720622 - Avoid crashing when library loading fails somehow

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Currently, when the linker fails to load libraries, Fennec just crashes. Considering we have a native UI, we could avoid that and do something useful instead, like displaying a message, exiting properly, and/or even allow to download the next nightly.

Comment 1

[Doug Turner (:dougt)]

Mike, No one is looking at this.  Is this something you prototyped up?

Comment 2

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

No, I just have patches that delay the crash. (that is avoid a crash in loadLibs, but then crash when JNI is called from java code)

Comment 3

[Josh Matthews [:jdm]]

I'm presuming about the language here; feel free to correct me.

Comment 4

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Yup. And actually I realize now somebody from the frontend team would be better since this mostly involves throwing up some pretty Android UI and shutting down properly.

Comment 5

[Brian Nicholson (:bnicholson)]

So what would we want here? Just some dialog with a string and an OK button?

Via IRC, Kats said that one possible cause of this lib load failing would be loading an ARMv7 build on an ARMv6 device, but that there is no way to distinguish that from other causes of the same crash. So is there anything useful we could actually give to the user at this point to help figure out the problem? If not, I'm not sure I see how this is an improvement over the crash reporter UI.

Comment 6

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

In that case you wouldn't get the crash reporter UI.

Comment 7

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

I think this is fixed via bug 990130.

Comment 8

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

AIUI, bug 990130 handled the case of the mozglue library failing to load, not gecko libraries.

Comment 9

[Rachelle Yang [:ryang][[e-mail]]]

Since the last update is more than 2 years, we are removing the tracking-fennec flag for now.
Feel free to renominate the bug if it happens again and it's reproducible. 

Thank you !

Comment 10

[BMO Automation]

We have completed our launch of our new Firefox on Android. The development of the new versions use GitHub for issue tracking. If the bug report still reproduces in a current version of [Firefox on Android nightly](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mozilla.fenix) an issue can be reported at the [Fenix GitHub project](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/). If you want to discuss your report please use [Mozilla's chat](https://wiki.mozilla.org/Matrix#Connect_to_Matrix) server https://chat.mozilla.org and join the [#fenix](https://chat.mozilla.org/#/room/#fenix:mozilla.org) channel.