1476816 - Investigate Android child process launch failures

Status: NEW

(GeckoView :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jed Davis [:jld] ⟨⏰|UTC-7⟩ ⟦he/him⟧]

This is roughly the Android equivalent of bug 1476811.  One of the debug crashes I'm removing in bug 1475382 (opaquely named `MOZ_RELEASE_ASSERT(13 == 14)`) indicates that LaunchAndroidService failed, and it's currently being hit about 25 times/week on Fennec Nightly.  (The `product` key is "FennecAndroid"; I don't know whether or not that includes GeckoView.)  Skimming the crash reports, it's mostly GeckoMediaPlugin processes but sometimes a content process.

I don't think we'll ever avoid launch failure, especially on resource-constrainted mobile devices, but it might be useful to gather data and get an idea of how prevalent this is, how it affects user experience, what we can/should do about it, etc.

(For example, on Mac we discovered and fixed bug 1469691 by looking into launch failures like that.)


I'm not sure if this is the right bug component, but the Android process launch glue isn't technically part of IPC and I don't know much about it.

Comment 1

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

This Android process-launching code will change a lot when we support e10s-multi on Android. snorp recommends we defer this investigation until we enable e10s-multi (bug 1530770).

Comment 2

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Moving to GV component because there is no process launching code in widget/android.

aklotz is working on Android e10s-multi now.

Comment 3

[Emily Toop (:fluffyemily)]

Moving to P3 as we are not intending to look at this until after e10s-multi has landed and that work is expected to continue for several more months.

Comment 4

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Moving content process bugs to the new GeckoView::Sandboxing component.

Comment 5

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Tasks and enhancements should have severity N/A.