Planning

Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Ideas
  3. Foundations Support
    1. Desktop
    2. Design
    3. Server
    4. Kernel
    5. OEM
      1. General Priorities
      2. Base Platform
      3. Usability and Performance
      4. Internationalization
      5. Small Disk Configuration Support
      6. Other
  4. Support FOR Foundations
    1. Desktop
    2. Launchpad
    3. QA
  5. Placeholders for Big Topics
  6. Lucid specs not done
  7. Lucid specs partly done
  8. Lucid specs mostly done

Introduction

This page is specifically for the planning of the Maverick development cycle. As such, it initially included a number of links for proposed UDS sessions.

However, prior to UDS, we needed to organize the proposed Foundations track sessions, so this work was moved to a separate UDS planning wiki page: /UDSBrussels. The format of that page is simply a long list of sessions that can be ordered, adjusted, etc. This will help in that we will only maintain one wiki page with a complete list of blueprint links, not two (or more).

Please note: if you wish to add links to various blueprints for inclusion in the session planning efforts, do not put them on the page that you are currently viewing. Please add them instead to /UDSBrussels.

Ideas

Foundations Support

As usual, Foundations will be providing Ubuntu support for the other teams. A high-level listing of projects where we likely will be involved is given in this section.

Desktop

Design

  • We probably ought to have a look-in on the multi-screen work, if it's dealing with remembering configurations for individual devices;
  • Installer, first boot, upgrades, Update Manager, and Software Centre;
  • System settings (maybe, depending on what this comes down to);
  • Possibly keyboard indicator but it depends what they're doing (if it's just visual then probably not).

Server

Kernel

OEM

General Priorities

  • Software Center enhancements (High) - Already planned
  • Multi-touch tablet support (Med) - Foundations work here may not be very strong; DX and Desktop, however, will be deeply involved

Base Platform

  • Hardware support for the new Intel (and likely AMD) CPU/chipset/GPU support (High) - 90% Kernel ownership; 10% Foundations
  • Remove use of intramfs in desktop and netbook editions (Med) - Foundations will support OEM removing this; however, Foundations actually needs initramfs to support more complicated use cases

  • Use swap files by default (instead of swap partitions) (Med) - Foundations would like to see this; there is an existing spec; currently blocked on a kernel problem (out of memory)

    • More flexible than swap partitions -
    • Need to make this work with hibernate/hybrid suspend
  • Energy Star compliance power settings by default (High) -
  • Add btrfs support - option at install time (High) - Already planned
    • More efficient for storing lots of small files. Helps w/ OS size and may help boot time
    • Supports compression. Good for OS size and may help boot time too.

Usability and Performance

  • Continue boot performance work, 10s goal for Dell Mini w/SSD, Lucid is still above that (High) - This goal was for unity, however there is no harm in continuing work; most work on this will likely be done with Scott finishing upstart
  • Hybrid suspend/hibernate by default. Allows the system to go to sleep, but also stores a hibernate image on disk. If the battery dies, the system wakes from the hibernate image (Med) - this might be ideal... however, not sure how feasible it will be; would make suspend a lot slower; means we'd be forced to use dodgey kernel hibernate code

Internationalization

  • Collaborate with i18n upstream more closely, especially on release schedule, e.g., we missed ibus-1.3 for LTS 10.04 (High) - general platform issue; Foundations will host a UDS discussion for this
  • Per-language ISOs (e.g. a Chinese ISO, a Swahili ISO, etc) (Low) - Foundations can't support this as a whole -- it would explode our test cases; however, Foundations will work with OEM if they need help generating their own ISOs

Small Disk Configuration Support

  • Audit packages and see if "depends" can become "recommends", making it easier for OEM to reduce dependency lists. (High) - let's use the bug-filing process to accomplish this: OEM can file, and Foundations can address this on a case-by-case basis
    • Example: xserver-xorg depends on xserver-xorg-video-all (actually, it depends on this OR a single driver) which pulls in *all* video drivers; if it were only recommended, you could specify only xserver-xorg-video-intel e.g. for your image
  • Remove all on-disk help/documentation and move it online. At the very least, split documentation into separate foopackage-doc.deb and make it a recommends. (High) - this is not appropriate for all use cases; we need to address this on a case-by-case basis; doing for all would guarantee that the index files would explode in size
  • Compressed r/w filesystem (High) - we will get this via btrfs
    • If btrfs is not feasible for some reason, we need a 'blessed' (by distro) r/w filesystem that supports compression (reiser, something FUSE-based, something else?)
    • We need r/w support to prevent the problem of updates taking too much disk space when using a r/o compressed filesystem like squashfs+unionfs
  • Updates for small disks - perform update as a sequence of partial atomic steps to minimize the use of disk (Med) - we do this now... so Foundations needs more detail to understand what need is not being fulfilled; OEM may mean downloading chunks and then applying it?

Other

  • BIOS validation tool (kernel team problem, not foundations? Colin King already working on this?) (High) - mostly Kernel with some Foundations
  • More stress testing before release (Med) - we will create UDS session for this: improving our testing procedures, using more automated tests, further brainstorming, etc.

Support FOR Foundations

Collect here items which we would like to see be done by other teams

Desktop

  • Java Applet maintainance / development
  • Stable xulrunner-1.9 interfaces when having more than one xulrunner version on the desktop (both eclipse and the icedtea6-plugin don't seem to get it right).

Launchpad

  • Soyuz/IS: Rebuild tests take too long, or slow down PPA buildds.
  • Soyuz: Native syncing via web service, to free up man-hours of archive admin time per week.
  • Buildd configuration, and how to reproduce results from test runs on the buildds. Differences in the configuration of distro and PPA buildds. LP: 556597 as an example. Seen with some eglibc test cases as well.

QA

  • TCK testing

Placeholders for Big Topics

Lucid specs not done

(Numbers in parentheses indicate to-do/postponed/done.)

Lucid specs partly done

Lucid specs mostly done

FoundationsTeam/Maverick/Planning (last edited 2010-05-04 14:04:46 by p5B09F55E)