All widgets gone for no reason? home screen is unresponsive? Media player widget play button stop working? My Idea - maemo.org

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	felbutss	2010-06-16 , 11:17
	Posts: 579 \| Thanked: 286 times \| Joined on Oct 2009 @ Australia	#1

Do You Have the Symptoms listed bellow on your N900? Don’t feel like Nokia have done anything to resolve the issue since reported on 2010-01-31? Sick of waiting and want to contribute ideas and maybe a fix for this issue?

_______________Symptoms_______________
*You Media player widget play button stop working
*you lost all of your widgets for no reason
*you have high CPU usage
*your home screen is unresponsive
*your N900 comes slow and jerky after a few days
*your N900 battery starts to drain fast until you restart
________________________________________

_______________Problem_______________

* PR1.2 was seriously delayed for many reasons but one of those reasons which is still not fixed is this bug https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8723 . This bug is the main cause of the above symptoms. (there are many other bug reports)
________________________________________

_______________Evidence_______________

This is a quote from chemist (Linux 2x debian stable 1x testing ) who can confirm this was a delay justification but the issue has by no means gone away and will never go away until you get a new device. Don’t plan on nokia to fix it as a bad widget will bring the issue right back again.

To pick up on Texrats advice...

Please be aware of that HK version is some kind of different to the global version so there maybe other things they have to look at for the global one.

Asking again and again for explanations wont help as you wont get much more than already released.

Nokia has a demand of working PRs so it might take some time to fullfill this. As already mentioned in the email, there are some bugs not easy to track down. I am currently investigating in hildon-home hickups which take about 2-5 days to occure so to determine which of the 3rd party programs is causing it takes weeks of testing already. He wrote about longterm issues and maybe they got a way to get something like home mess up in a shorter time but still it will take weeks to test and fix.
https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8723 - Reported 2010-01-31

If you like to have your phone broken or bricked because of a leaked PR's RC this is ok with me. Maybe there is no closed community test for PR1.2 as Nokia does not want to take the risk yet. Have you thought of that they may bricked devices while testing and decided to not release yet?

Please chill out on the PR1.2 topic. We all have to wait! Posting off-topic and Nokia requests all over the place doesn't help any one but keeps the moderators busy.

http://www.forums.internettablettalk.com/showpost.php?p=649228&postcount=29
___________________________________

_______________My FIX – Idea points_______________

-Points of proposal-
1: Create a new hildon process called ‘hildon-widget’
2: Separate widgets from hildon-home completely
3: Layer of hildon-home and multiple instances of hildon-widget
4: Each individual widget owns an instance of hildon-widget and doesn't affect any other instance as currently a widget breaks, the whole phone breaks and a restart won’t fix it.
5: A widget using a instance of hildon-widget starts to break due to bugs, memory leaks, high CPU usage and hangs it auto restart’s a fresh copy of hildon-widget with the widget back on the screen automatically without the user being aware.
6: When a widget does crash and restarts itself, it dump’s information into an event log so it can easily be debugged or redeveloped. No more looking around for weeks on end.

Know what I mean? Maybe someone can code this? This just puts me off if I was a developer as I would be worried to develop widgets. Anything I develop might seriously hinder the device. It should be about promoting the open source community not scaring it into moving away from it. What are we supposed to do just not use widgets? Not make phone calls? Wait for the screen to stop showing a black screen before I answer a call? Re-launch the media widget every day??

Let’s face it Nokia will not fix this issue so it’s up to us. what do you guys think?? impossible?? nothing is impossible!!

_______________My FIX – Visual representation_______________

Attached Images

Last edited by felbutss; 2010-06-17 at 09:43.

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	pelago	2010-06-16 , 13:38
	Posts: 2,121 \| Thanked: 1,540 times \| Joined on Mar 2008 @ Oxford, UK	#2

Thanks for all your effort on this. So basically you're proposing process separation for all hildon-desktop widgets? I agree that should improve stability. I worry slightly that it might use a few more resources.

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	felbutss	2010-06-16 , 16:28
	Posts: 579 \| Thanked: 286 times \| Joined on Oct 2009 @ Australia	#3

maybe someone with skills can expand on it

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das_schlumpfie	2010-06-16 , 19:40
Posts: 296 \| Thanked: 10 times \| Joined on May 2010	#4

thanks, just now all my widgets are gone for no reason again, third time today. bloody hell whats going on.

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	felbutss	2010-06-17 , 04:11
	Posts: 579 \| Thanked: 286 times \| Joined on Oct 2009 @ Australia	#5

like i said before. dont ever expect this issue to be fixed. their stance on this issue is its 'our fault'

Last edited by felbutss; 2010-06-17 at 09:38.

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Joorin	2010-06-17 , 04:54
Posts: 726 \| Thanked: 345 times \| Joined on Apr 2010 @ Sweden	#6

Originally Posted by felbutss

like i said before. dont ever expect this issue to be fixed. their stance on this issue is its 'our fault'

In a way, it is the users fault. As soon as you venture into the wild forest that is community made software, you're running the risk of getting the blame when things break and often there are actual bugs that cause the problems.

Wanting some cool widget hot from the developers fingertips is ok as long as you, as the end user, is prepared to be a guinea pig. Sadly this is also true for some of the Nokia code...

Regarding your suggestion, I think it might be a little too costly to have separate processes, as in one per widget. Threading, on the other hand, would be much more interesting. This way, the main widget process would be able to kill threads at its leasure if need be without the added cost of having a whole new process.

Separating the different widgets from eachother is a good idea.

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	felbutss	2010-06-17 , 06:51
	Posts: 579 \| Thanked: 286 times \| Joined on Oct 2009 @ Australia	#7

i did some googling and my idea is not new.
Read the bellow articles.
______________________________________________

1:
Programming Konfabulator Widgets
http://fb2.hu/x10/Articles/ProgrammingWidgets.html

Each widget is actually a separate process, which runs its own interpreter instance.

2:
Opera Widgets for Desktop Labs release
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog...se?startidx=50

With the new Opera Widgets for Desktop we managed to break the dependency between widgets and the browser interface. From now on you don't have to have the Opera Browser open to run a widget. Furthermore, each widget runs in a separate process and integrates with the platform much better

&

Opera 10.50 features
http://mobi-planet.net/viewthread.php?tid=1870

New Opera Widgets for Desktop

A new platform allows Opera Widgets to move beyond the Web browser and onto your desktop. Multi-process architecture allows each widget to run as a separate process. Native OS integration now lets widgets behave like normal applications.

Opera is designed to restart and recover all your tabs if a crash occurs

3:
Firefox
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Fea...ng:Performance

Stability and resource-utilization improvements Put each document into an independent process (not thread: separate forked process) so that:
When a document causes Firefox to crash, the whole browser won't be taken with it.

When a bug in Firefox stomps on memory it doesn't own, other documents in memory are not corrupted.

When a document causes Firefox to leak massive amounts of memory, closing that tab or window will free up the wasted memory.

Memory fragmentation: If I open three documents, then close the second one, no memory is returned to the OS for other apps, because memory is only freed to the OS from the end of the heap. Also, however, I notice that if I open one document (and check the memory size), then open two more, then close the last two, the process size does not shrink back to what it was with only the first document (this looks like a memory leak). Putting each document into its own address space would solve these problems, because processes that terminate free all of their memory to the OS.

When a bug in Firefox or a script on the page locks up (infinite loop or whatnot), the whole browser will not hang up

im also sure that yahoo widgets run separate process to

Last edited by felbutss; 2010-06-17 at 06:55.

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	juise-	2010-06-17 , 07:39
	Posts: 186 \| Thanked: 192 times \| Joined on Jan 2010 @ Finland	#8

Originally Posted by Joorin

Regarding your suggestion, I think it might be a little too costly to have separate processes, as in one per widget.

On Linux, a process is somewhat costly to create.

However, once it's there, it doesn't really require that much more resources than a thread would. Also, how many widgets are people going to have? 10? 50? Not a big deal, just look at the amount of processes that currently runs on your N900. (ok, some of them actually are only threads)

Also, using threads would not solve the problem, since multiple threads within single process still live under same memory address space, i.e. can still trivially screw up each other.

Originally Posted by felbutss

i did some googling and my idea is not new.

Indeed it is not. Also, in general, adding hardware separation (yes, in most implementations, there is hardware involved with process separation, controlled by the OS) between software components has proven itself as a good idea over time.

__________________
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	pelago	2010-06-17 , 08:46
	Posts: 2,121 \| Thanked: 1,540 times \| Joined on Mar 2008 @ Oxford, UK	#9

As hildon-desktop is open source, I wonder what the chances are of the community implementing something like this? Would any code be needed to be changed in the widgets? If widget code had to change then that might scupper this idea, as we cannot modify closed-source Nokia widgets.

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	stickymick	2010-06-17 , 09:01
	Posts: 1,079 \| Thanked: 1,019 times \| Joined on Mar 2010	#10

Haha. Not a very constructive post, I know, but this reminds me of something that happened to me last week.

I was viewing a screenshot of my desktop in the gallery, something distracted me so I put the phone down to go check it out. When I came back it had gone into standby mode, pulled the lock switch down tapped my email shortcut and...........

WTF is going on here?
Tapping the screen like a demented chimp until I realised what was happening.

But anyway, back on topic.
I used to get disappearing widgets before PR1.2 and when I went to replace them the menu was full of "Cairo" stuff. Happened a couple of times after PR1.2 but discovered it was one of the widgets that was causing it. Not seen the problem since.