1046118 - Provide some visual feedback when texture allocation fails in a tiled layer

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Core :: Graphics: Layers, defect)

Description

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

If we fail to allocate a tile for whatever reason, rendering is going to be broken (there is going to be a missing tile in the compositing). I'd like to make it visually obvious when this happens, so that we can easily tell the difference between running short on video memory and having a bug in the tiling code (as in misplaced tile, etc.).
I'm thinking something simple like render a pink rectangle where the tile should have been displayed, and maybe do it only in debug builds or put it behind a pref.

Thoughts?

Comment 1

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

We talked about it during the daily meeting, and the conclusion was, let's do this and use a pref to decide whether it is best to crash the app (or the browser in the case of non-e10s desktop firefox) or render a pink marker.

Comment 2

[Milan Sreckovic [:milan] (needinfo for best results)]

Makes sense to go with the pref, especially if there may be security concerns with not crashing.

Comment 3

[Nicolas Silva [:nical]]

More work than its worth. Plus, at the moment we'd rather make sure that allocation never fails (except when running out of memory in which case gfx starts glitching anyways) and crash when it does, so visual feedback for tile allocation failures won't help that much at this point. Marking wontfix for now.