2038644 - Add helpful dev console message if Firefox doesn't have permission to access serial ports

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Web Serial, enhancement)

Description

[Greg Stoll :gstoll]

This can be a common problem on Linux, especially for Snap/Flatpak.

Comment 1

[Greg Stoll :gstoll]

I assume to make this work we will want to look at what udev returns and see if we get failures to call open() with errno=13 (permission denied). However, in a log that did succeed in opening some ports, we still get some errno=13 errors for things like /dev/tty0.

So I want to make sure that

• we do show this message if we only get permission denied errors
• we do not show this message if the user has permission but there are no devices attached to any serial ports

Unfortunately I'm having a hard time reproducing the "not working" functionality on my linux system; installing a snap I built locally works fine (but an official beta snap does not). So I think I'm just going to add some logging for now in a dependent bug, wait for that to make its way to a real release, and reevaluate then.

Comment 2

[Greg Stoll :gstoll]

Attachment: Bug 2038644 - print dev console method if no permission for serial ports on Linux r=Thinker!

I tested this on my Linux machine and verified that the message shows up
if I remove my permission to access /dev/ttyS0, etc.

Comment 3

[Pulsebot]

Pushed by [e-mail]:
https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox/commit/dded6b2602b0
https://hg.mozilla.org/integration/autoland/rev/a49e2ba690f6
print dev console method if no permission for serial ports on Linux r=Thinker

Comment 4

[Norisz Fay [:noriszfay]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/a49e2ba690f6