Quick heads-up: Ubuntu memory leak issue

[Nelson Marques]

Press Release? 8)


On Tue, 2010-04-27 at 23:30 +0100, Adam Williamson wrote:
> Hey everyone, just a quick heads-up. Some of you may have read about a
> memory leak that cropped up very late in Ubuntu 10.04 development
> process. They kindly put this phrase in their explanation of the bug:
> 
> "One possible solution is to roll back the GLX 1.4 enablement patches,
> and the patch which caused the memory leak to appear. These GLX patches
> were produced by RedHat and incorporated into Debian, they were not
> brought in due to Ubuntu-specific requirements"
> 
> which can obviously create the impression that the patches in question
> actually come from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or from Fedora.
> 
> Short story for the impatient: the problematic patch is not in any
> version of Fedora and never has been, Fedora is not subject to this
> memory leak and never has been.
> 
> So if you see any stories drawing the implication that Fedora is also
> subject to this leak, please feel free to correct them - it isn't.
> 
> Longer version for the curious: I'm not sure about the claim that the
> 'GLX 1.4 enablement patches' come from Red Hat, they may be in RHEL for
> some reason, but they're not in Fedora; we wouldn't need to backport GLX
> 1.4 from X server 1.8 to 1.7 as we're just shipping X server 1.8 in
> Fedora 13 anyway.
> 
> Regardless, the actual patch that caused the problem in Ubuntu was not
> part of the GLX 1.4 backport, but was an attempt to fix this bug:
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26394
> 
> Sometimes X would crash when Clutter-based apps closed. Fedora did
> actually suffer from this bug too:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=579756
> 
> However, Ubuntu and Fedora took different approaches to fixing it.
> Ubuntu seems to have jumped on one of Jesse Barnes' early attempts to
> fix the problem (Jesse works for RH, hence the Red Hat link). In the
> end, though, if you read the upstream bug, Jesse ceded to Kristian
> Høgsberg (who, for the record, works for Intel), who provided a better
> fix which was committed to upstream. For Fedora 13, we took Kristian's
> fix, not any of Jesse's attempts. This was included in
> xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-7.fc13 . That seems to have caused a couple of
> problems with compositing managers:
> 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=584832
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=577142
> 
> -7 was sent as a candidate update for F13, got bad Bodhi feedback (as
> you'd expect) and was withdrawn; it never went into the 'stable' F13
> repo (the one from which the final F13 will actually be built). The bugs
> were fixed by adding one more upstream patch, from Michel Dänzer:
> 
> http://cvs.fedoraproject.org/viewvc/rpms/xorg-x11-server/F-13/xserver-1.8.0-dri2-fix-handling-of-redirected-pixmaps.patch?view=markup
> 
> to xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-8.fc13 . That build has good feedback:
> 
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/xorg-x11-server-1.8.0-8.fc13
> 
> and was pushed to F13 updates two days ago. So in summary our processes
> worked very well, we didn't jump on an incomplete fix, we didn't push
> the initial upstream fix to the 'stable' F13 because our feedback system
> made us aware of the problems it caused, we did push the fully-working
> fixed package when it was confirmed ready, and we were never at any
> point subject to the memory leak issue. This is actually quite a nice
> story of our QA processes working effectively, if someone's looking for
> such a thing. =)
> -- 
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
> http://www.happyassassin.net
> 
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-- 
Nelson Marques
Evil Clown (http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/evilclown.htm)