Friday, September 09, 2011

Win64 status update

Hi all,
Since my last status update a lot of things have happened:
  • The opt builds are going green
  • The builds are now showing on the developer's dashboard: tbpl. 
  • All branches have win64 builds (I have added the last few this morning)
    • We have try support for win64 (implied in previous point)
    • We don't have win64 support for aurora, beta, release and 1.9.2
What is it missing to be at par with other operating systems?
  • Testing infrastructure
    • We currently have 5 Win7 64-bit machines and they are only testing mozilla-central (as of today) to keep up
    • The other 50 that we had were repurposed 3 months ago for the other operating systems so we could increase their capacity by 8-10%. It was a tough call but it was necessary to keep up.
  • Debug builds
    • Symbols. It seems we are hitting a Microsoft bug. We will disable them for now
    • Packaging.
  • Symbols for the try server.
Perhaps some people won't agree that we should make the tests visible for mozilla-central since we don't have testing coverage for other branches. Nevertheless I believe that it makes sense that we could have a way of seeing tests failing rather than not at all. If it takes us 3-4 weeks to clone more machines we would be adding test failures without seeing them. I don't think it is asking for too much to try to file a bug for a test failure and carry on (even hide it) if we are not willing to back the change out or to fix the failure. At least we would have a merge to blame for or a range of pushes to help debugging the issues. If you disagree feel free to do what you think is best for everybody.

EDIT: Fixed typo 64-bi instead of 65-bit.
EDIT: For further info please follow the tracking bug.
EDIT: To try the build go to http://nightly.mozilla.org

Creative Commons License
This work by Zambrano Gasparnian, Armen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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4 comments:

  1. Anonymous9 Sept 2011, 13:56:00

    Is 65-bit superior to 64-bit and if so, where I can get those builds. ;) Harmless typo, keep up the great Win64 work!

    ReplyDelete
  2. armenzg9 Sept 2011, 14:24:00

    You should really try those 65-bit builds... they are soooo fast.

    Thanks for catching that typo. I have added few edits.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown1 Oct 2011, 23:09:00

    i really hope 64bit manages to be mainstream and get much more focus then the 32 builds someday, i have been using the 64bit nightly for a looong time as my main browser and have loved it. benchmarks show it to be faster then its 32 cousin and i can see that in my day to day use

    ReplyDelete
  4. armenzg3 Oct 2011, 09:57:00

    Hi LordKitsuna,
    I found this benchmark article interesting as well [1].
    I have worked hard on this so I hope it becomes official as well.
    Once product drivers take decision on making this happen you could follow up changes in here:
    https://wiki.mozilla.org/Features/Desktop/64bit_Firefox_Windows_7

    cheers,
    Armen

    [1] http://www.extremetech.com/computing/90546-firefox-8-x64-has-64-bit-browsing-finally-come-of-age

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