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[Official announcement] Current status of Update10 [answered]

asked 2014-12-02 16:19:59 +0200

bijjal gravatar image

updated 2015-07-25 21:21:48 +0200

eric gravatar image
Updated on 3.12.2014

Dear Jolla users,

We've been working hard on improving the out of memory (OOM) handling by the OS since the update9 opt-in was released. A portion of our time went into demo preparations for Slush and of course the tablet launch. This has left us lagging a bit behind the internal release schedule for update10.

We'd like to share the highlights of the improvements we've done so far:

  • Ensured that phone UI never gets killed when OOM (Out of Memory) handling kicks in
  • Improved handling of tabs in browser by releasing GPU memory on closing tabs
  • Automatically unloading browser tabs in low memory situation
  • Dropping memory-heavy HTML email viewer from memory when not used in a while
  • Messages app is no longer kept in memory when the window is closed by the user
  • Only load Phone dialers, Device lock, Facebook and Twitter feed pages in memory on demand
  • Enabled memory compaction configuration option in kernel
  • Removed unneeded/unnecessary kernel options to save memory
  • Added memnotify patch to kernel to get notifications on memory thresholds being crossed
  • Made MCE able to receive and set up memory thresholds with /dev/memnotify
  • Connection manager VPN daemon (connman-vpnd) is no longer started on boot to lower memory footprint
  • Enabled zram in kernel, suggested by community in this post

Furthermore, we are looking into:

  • optimising handling notifications in events view when there are lots of them
  • optimising call log models, and limiting the number of call log pages being loaded to reduce the time taken to startup phone app and drop memory usage
  • making OOM killer more verbose to further aid debugging
  • debugging frequent crashes observed during internal testing
  • improving OOM handling for Android applications
  • tuning operating system memory policies to guarantee there is enough memory available for user's next task

Finalisation of update10 depends on the above mentioned points and bringing SailfishOS version compatibility support for Jolla Store and Harbour. We really hope to release before Christmas, though in the event we are unable to accomplish the improvements stated above by the end of next week (=1 week before Christmas holidays begin), we will not release update10 during December. We prefer to not release at the start of a vacation period when we are not around to support you in the first few days of a new release.

Thanking you for your patience and continued support,

Jolla team

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The question has been closed for the following reason "the question is answered, an answer was accepted" by eric
close date 2015-04-14 10:06:36.791102

Comments

7

Hi Sailors, thanks for sharing information. What about other features. Is the list you gave the complete changelog for update 10?

mousse04 ( 2014-12-02 16:25:03 +0200 )edit
8

Well, this update would calm lot of anxious users here . Thanks for the update and your efforts on Sailfish OS.

anandrkris ( 2014-12-02 16:28:57 +0200 )edit
33

Thanks! Make the release rather more stable than sooner. :)

William ( 2014-12-02 16:32:45 +0200 )edit
2

Thanks for the update, the main issue then, that blocks the release, is OOM problem, it seems that the available RAM resource is not enough?

pmelas ( 2014-12-02 16:33:52 +0200 )edit
7

Jolla team, thanks for the info. As you stated, it's best to have a proper and working update than some almost-ready update. We'll just have to be patient...

MikaN ( 2014-12-02 16:35:19 +0200 )edit

1 Answer

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183

answered 2014-12-02 23:43:15 +0200

bijjal gravatar image

We did a post-mortem on late releases to figure out what went wrong with our development cycle and surely do not mind sharing our thoughts on this here. One of main reasons has been that we underestimated the work needed to successfully complete the Qt5.2 transition. We also made a conscious decision to leave for summer vacation together, leaving the development branch open for contributions without integration promotions (QA) to testing repository for that period. When we returned, it took double the time to stabilize the development branch before going forward. Coupled with losing a few of our fellow sailors, our developers had to stretch beyond their comfort zones to debug and attempt finding the root cause of the crashes, performance hits, connectivity issues, memory handling among other things. We have moved slowly, but steadily.

On a positive note, we have amended our integration process to avoid the pitfalls we faced during this transition. We have also enabled better ways to develop new features and technology in parallel with the main codebase, allowing integration only when code is relatively stable.

As for content of update10, this post is not the complete changelog. It just aims to update you on the reason we flagged update9 as suitable for opt-in.

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Comments

4

@bijjal Thanks for taking the time to reply. I hope the assessment and resulting changes improve things, both for you and us. I would be a little worried about the impact Xmas / NY holidays may have though, given what you say about summer, especially immediately pre-MWC.

-x-

Whilst we have your attention, is there any chance of a comment on paid apps? Is it a case of waiting for Warehouse / Store to be fixed, as mentioned in your update?

midnightoil ( 2014-12-02 23:52:14 +0200 )edit
43

We are already seeing improvements in the daily work and really hope to get back to our usual speed after update10. I do agree that Christmas holidays will slow down our work for about 2 weeks, but not in the scale of summer holidays which can easily span from 2-5 weeks. And you rightly noted MWC, we'll surely have preparations for that too. Paid apps support is really high on our priority list for Jolla Store, we are currently blocked by some technicalities here. I have no schedule for you yet, but I hope to share a rough plan on SailfishOS improvements for the next few months during December.

bijjal ( 2014-12-03 00:20:14 +0200 )edit

Good to know. I really hope you do get back on track.

midnightoil ( 2014-12-03 00:40:21 +0200 )edit
4

@bijjal Could you share the name of the update already?

simo ( 2014-12-03 00:47:10 +0200 )edit
2

Does that really matter @simo ? :D

midnightoil ( 2014-12-03 00:47:41 +0200 )edit

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Asked: 2014-12-02 16:19:59 +0200

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Last updated: Dec 19 '14