1623265 - Stop disabling / enable hardware acceleration (HWA)

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

In 2015 hardware acceleration was disabled by default due to a large number of problems. See bug 1131879. With a change made in bug 1619032, our non-standard HWA preferences are causing a problem with a test.

I think we should stop disabling this by default and see if the problems remain.

Comment 1

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

I recently started looking at this area myself. Took it a step further and enabled webrender in several of my Firefox and Thunderbird instances - NTF so far.

Agreed - let's give it a couple weeks on nightly.

Comment 2

[Geoff Lankow (:darktrojan)]

Attachment: 1623265-enable-hwa-1.diff

I did a Try run with these changes and they do fix the current test failure without introducing new failures. No real surprise there.

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

The reason I started looking at this is Bug 1381485 - Hangs sending mail while copying message to Sent folder on Mac-only while displaying the progress bar. Deadlock in graphics on CGLClearDrawable.

Comment 4

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Comment on attachment 9134070 [details] [diff] [review]
1623265-enable-hwa-1.diff

Review of attachment 9134070 [details] [diff] [review]:
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Let's do it.

Comment 5

[Calum Mackay]

as a minor data point, I enabled HWA via Prefs, for Daily, on MacOS 10.14.6 a month or two ago: no trouble so far.

Comment 6

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://hg.mozilla.org/comm-central/rev/18828895ee5d
Stop disabling hardware acceleration. r=mkmelin

Comment 7

[Intermittent Failures Robot]

17 failures in 908 pushes (0.019 failures/push) were associated with this bug yesterday.

Repository breakdown:

• comm-central: 17

Platform breakdown:

• linux64: 4
• linux32: 4
• windows7-32: 3
• macosx1014-64: 3
• windows10-64: 3

For more details, see:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/intermittent-failures.html#/bugdetails?bug=1623265&startday=2020-03-18&endday=2020-03-18&tree=all

Comment 8

[Intermittent Failures Robot]

17 failures in 4955 pushes (0.003 failures/push) were associated with this bug in the last 7 days.

Repository breakdown:

• comm-central: 17

Platform breakdown:

• linux64: 4
• linux32: 4
• windows7-32: 3
• macosx1014-64: 3
• windows10-64: 3

For more details, see:
https://treeherder.mozilla.org/intermittent-failures.html#/bugdetails?bug=1623265&startday=2020-03-16&endday=2020-03-22&tree=all

Comment 9

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Comment on attachment 9134070 [details] [diff] [review]
1623265-enable-hwa-1.diff

I'd be more comfortable taking this in 75.0b3 which will have much fewer changes than the upcoming 76.0b1.  In part because it will be much easier to determine whether user problem reports are caused by HWA vs 500 other patches in 76. 

If anyone has concerns, speak up before we build the beta.   I'm feeling good about Mac users. But I am wary for Windows users for  which this was disabled in  bug 1131879 - we should be prepared to quickly back it out for Windows users (or Mac users) if problem reports come in.

Comment 10

[Rob Lemley [:rjl]]

Thunderbird 75.0b3:
https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/comm-beta/rev/03e2e841494d

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

No ill effects have been reported thus far, so I am feeling good about taking this on ESR. Looking forward to mitigating the effects of bug 1381485.
If you agree, please nominate.

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Based on emails in tb-drivers, backing off enabling HWA for 68