Apertis 17.09 Release

17.09 is the current stable development release of Apertis, a Debian/Ubuntu derivative distribution geared towards the creation of product-specific images for ARM (both in the 32bit ARMv7 version using the hardfloat ABI and in the 64-bit ARMv8 version) and Intel x86-64 (64-bit) systems.

This Apertis release is based on top of the Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) LTS release with several customization. Test results of the 17.09 release are available in the 17.09 test report.

Release downloads

Apertis 17.09 images
Intel 64-bit

The minimal, target and development images are tested on the reference hardware (MinnowBoard MAX), but they can run on any UEFI-based x86-64 system. The sdk image is tested under VirtualBox.

Apertis 17.09 repositories

 $ deb https://repositories.apertis.org/apertis/ 17.09 target helper-libs development sdk hmi

New features

During this release the focus has been on bugfixes and improvements on the server infrastructure, but this does not mean that we lack new features: in particular, the application framework refactoring that has been started during the 17.06 cycle has landed in 17.09, and it is now able to work on system which lack direct access to a Btrfs filesystem. This is extremely useful for systems using flash-based filesystems and for containers-based setups where allowing the container privileged access to the file system may be undesirable. Compatibility with existing Btrfs-based setups is preserved, and they can be migrated transparently.

Groundwork

Apertis now works better in a container right out of the box, ensuring that AppArmor is enabled and disabling some filesytem-related services which are not needed inside a container.

Automation has been a recurring theme during this cycle, and now the developers documentation is automatically deployed on push. The main automation effort has been in defining more formally the whole release branching process and automate the most of it: this will allow us to make releases with more ease, reducing the chance of errors and focusing our efforts on making Apertis even more awesome.

Design and documentation

The Apertis platform guide now provides an high-level overview of what the Apertis platform is, which components compose it and what are the concepts that drive its development.

The Hello World section in the application developers guide has been updated to reflect the latest Eclipse UI.

If you want to run Apertis in a container, the setup instructions have been overhauled and clarified, and running an Apertis container under an Apertis system just takes a couple of minutes.

On the design front, the Inter-Domain Communications document now has some provisions for sharing large amount of static data as bulk transfers, such as firmware updates or map data for offline navigation.

Deprecations and ABI/API breaks

Deprecations

During this release cycle we have continued to mark obsolete or problematic APIs with the ABI break tag as a way to clear technical debt in future.

Mildenhall UI framework

The Mildenhall UI toolkit is deprecated in favour of other UI toolkits such as GTK+, Qt, or HTML5-based solutions

From the next release Apertis may no longer ship the Mildenhall UI toolkit, as the underlying Clutter library has been deprecated upstream for some years now.

Application framework

ribchester-full and canterbury-full are deprecated

From the next release Canterbury and Ribchester will only offer the APIs provided by the respective -core and the additional APIs offered by the -full packages will be dropped<

Breaks

No known breaking changes are part of the 17.09 release.

Infrastructure

Apertis infrastructure tools

For Debian Jessie based systems:

 $ deb https://repositories.apertis.org/debian/ jessie tools

For Ubuntu Trusty based systems:

 $ deb https://repositories.apertis.org/ubuntu/ trusty tools

Images

Image daily builds, as well as release builds can be found at:

 https://images.apertis.org/

Image build tools can be found in the Apertis tools repositories.

Known issues

High (3)

  • Crash observed on seed module when we accesing the D-Bus call method

  • Containers fail to load on Gen4 host

  • The video player window is split into 2 frames in default view

Normal (132)

  • On first flashing of the image any second application does not get displayed (eg. album art)

  • On multiple re-entries from settings to eye the compositor hangs

  • Automated tests are not run on ARM

  • introspectable support for GObject property, signal and methods

  • Target ARM images contain a spurious rootfs.tar.gz in the boot partition

  • Crash observed on webruntime framework

  • Incorrect network available state shown in GNetworkMonitor

  • libreoffice fails to build from source on aarch64

  • Observing multiple service instances in all 17.06 SDK images

  • Frampton application doesn’t load when we re-launch them after clicking the back button

  • Rendering issue observed on websites like http://www.moneycontrol.com

  • Render theme buttons are not updating with respect to different zoom levels

  • HTML5 demo video’s appear flipped when played on webkit2 based browser app

  • Broken HTML generation in Backworth for the developers portal website

  • Page rendering is not smooth in sites like www.yahoo.com

  • Mildenhall should install themes in the standard xdg data dirs

  • webkit2GTK crash observed flicking on webview from other widget

  • Failed to load Captcha in Apertis developer portal

  • webkit-ac-3d-rendering test case fails

  • Newport test fails on minimal images

  • Avoid unconstrained dbus AppArmor rules in frome

  • Steps like pattern is seen in the background in songs application

  • virtual keyboard is not showing for password input field of any webpage

  • u-boot: Unable to find the device tree for R-car starter kit H3UCLB

  • Shutdown not working properly in virtualbox

  • bredon-0-launcher should be shipped in its own package, not in libbredon-0-1

  • webview-test should be shipped in libbredon-0-tests instead of libbredon-0-1

  • libbredon/seed uninstallable on target as they depend on libraries in :development

  • Mismatching gvfs/gvfs-common and libatk1.0-0/libatk1.0-data package versions in the archive

  • MildenhallSelPopupItem model should be changed to accept only gchar * instead of MildenhallSelPopupItemIconDetail for icons

  • Rhosydd service crashes when client exits on some special usecases (Refer description for it)

  • rhosydd-client crashes when displaying vehicle properties for mock backend

  • libmildenhall-0-0 contains files that would conflict with a future libmildenhall-0-1

  • libshoreham packaging bugs

  • arm-linux-gnueabihf-pkg-config does not work with sysroots installed by `ade`

  • MildenhallSelectionPopupItem doesn’t take ownership when set properties

  • In mildenhall, URL history speller implementation is incomplete.

  • Variable roller is not working

  • Roller problem in settings application

  • Songs do not start playing from the beginning but instead start a little ahead

  • Blank screen seen in Songs application on re-entry

  • Compositor hides the other screens

  • Status bar is not getting updated with the current song/video being played

  • canterbury: Most of the tests fail

  • ribchester: gnome-desktop-testing test times out

  • rhosydd: integration test fails

  • didcot-client: autopkgtest fails with org.apertis.Didcot.Error.NoApplicationFound and ““Unit didcot.service could not be found””

  • GtkClutterLauncher: Segfaults with mouse right-clicking

  • Cross debugging through GDB and GDBserver Not possible.

  • Voice/Audio is not heard for the Bluez-hfp profile in i.MX6

  • Deploying LAVA tests for SDK images on personal stream fails

  • The web runtime doesn’t set the related view when opening new windows

  • Segmentation fault when disposing test executable of mildenhall

  • <abstractions/chaiwala-base> gives privileges that not every app-bundle should have

  • Canterbury entry-point launching hides global popups, but only sometimes

  • Album art is missing in one of the rows of the songs application

  • folks: random tests fail

  • GLib, GIO Reference Manual links are incorrectly swapped

  • GObject Generator link throws 404 error

  • Search feature doesn’t work correctly for appdev portal located at https://appdev.apertis.org/documentation/index.html

  • cgroups-resource-control: test network-cgroup-prio-class failed

  • webview Y offset not considered to place, full screen video on youtube webpage

  • Confirm dialog status updated before selecting the confirm option YES/NO

  • gupnp-services tests test_service_browsing and test_service_introspection fail on target-arm image

  • Resizing the window causes page corruption

  • Content on a webpage doesn’t load in sync with the scroll bar

  • Compositor seems to hide the bottom menu of a webpage

  • telepathy-gabble-tests should depend on python-dbus

  • libgles2-vivante-dev is not installable

  • mx6qsabrelite: linking issue with libgstimxeglvivsink.so and libgstimxvpu.so gstreamer plugins

  • apparmor-folks: unable to link contacts to test unlinking

  • tracker tests: Error creating thumbnails: No poster key found in metadata

  • Cannot open links within website like yahoo.com

  • mildenhall_launcher process needs to be killed in order to view browser using webkit2 GtkClutterLauncher

  • polkit-parsing: TEST_RESULT:fail

  • make check fails on libbredon package for wayland warnings

  • Ribchester: deadlock when calling RemoveApp() right after RollBack()

  • Canterbury messes up kerning when .desktop uses unicode chars

  • VirtualBox freezes using 100% CPU when resuming the host from suspend

  • VirtualBox display freezes when creating multiple notifications at once and interacting (hover and click) with them

  • apparmor-tracker: underlying_tests failed

  • tracker-indexing-local-storage: Stopping tracker-store services

  • Clang package fails to install appropriate egg-info needed by hotdoc

  • Unusable header in Traprain section in Devhelp

  • Album Art Thumbnail missing in Thumb view in ARTIST Application

  • If 2 drawers are activated, the most recent one hides behind the older one, instead of coming on top of older one.

  • Test apps are failing in Liblightwood with the use of GTest

  • Focus in launcher rollers broken because of copy/paste errors

  • Mismatch between server version file and sysroot version

  • Pulse Audio volume control doesn’t launch as a separate window on SDK

  • Images for the video links are not shown in news.google.com on GtkClutterLauncher

  • Crash when initialising egl on ARM target

  • Zoom in feature does not work on google maps

  • Cannot open/view pdf documents in browser (GtkClutterLauncher)

  • Drop down lists are not working on a site like facebook

  • gupnp-services: test service failed

  • LAVA: Could not resolve host: repositories.apertis.org

  • shapwick reads /etc/nsswitch.conf and /etc/passwd, and writes /var/root/.cache/dconf/

  • factory reset with a different image’s rootfs.tar.gz results in emergency mode

  • GStreamer playbin prioritises imxeglvivsink over clutterautovideosink

  • Fix folks EDS tests to not be racy

  • Interaction with PulseAudio not allowed by its AppArmor profile

  • Background video is not played in some website with GtkClutterLauncher

  • Share links to facebook, twitter are nbt working in browser (GtkClutterLauncher)

  • The background HMI is blank on clicking the button for Power OFF

  • libsoup-unit: ssl-test failed for ARM

  • Horizontal scroll is not shown on GtkClutterLauncher

  • telepathy-gabble: Several tests failed

  • Investigate why development ARM image fails to generate

  • minimal image: DISPLAY sanity check tests failed

  • Unsupported launguage text is not shown on the page in GtkClutterLauncher

  • Back option is missing as part of the tool tip

  • Target doesn’t reboot after system update

  • Bluetooth pairing option not working as expected

  • Video doesn’t play when toggling from full screen to detail view

  • Theme ,any F node which is a child of an E node is not working for Apertis widgets.

  • cgroups-resource-control: blkio-weights tests failed

  • Videos are hidden when Eye is launched

  • mildenhall-settings: does not generate localization files from source

  • libgrassmoor: executes tracker-control binary

  • Clutter_text_set_text API redraws entire clutterstage

  • factory-reset-tool TC: flagcheck messages are hidden by Plymouth

  • mxkineticscrollview-smooth-pan:Free scroll doesn’t work

  • Network search pop-up isn’t coming up in wi-fi settings

  • apparmor-libreoffice: libreoffice.normal.expected fails: ods_to_pdf: fail [Bugzilla bug #331]

  • apparmor-pulseaudio: ARM Failed to drain stream: Timeout

  • Power button appers to be disabled on target

  • Documentation is not available from the main folder

  • Only half of the hmi is covered when opening gnome.org

  • remove INSTALL, aclocal.m4 files from langtoft

  • No connectivity Popup is not seen when the internet is disconnected.

  • Not able to load heavy sites on GtkClutterLauncher

Low (16)

  • developer.a.o CSS broken

  • connman: patch “device: Don’t report EALREADY” not accepted upstream

  • connman: patch “Use ProtectSystem=true” rejected upstream

  • qemu-arm-static not found in the pre installed qemu-user-static package

  • Spacing issues between text and selection box in website like amazon

  • LAVA doesn’t report all results for some Target ARM tests

  • gstreamer1-0-decode: Failed to load plugin warning

  • beep audio decoder gives errors continously

  • Context drawer displced when switching to fullscreen in browser app

  • Printing hotdoc webpage directly results in misformatted document

  • Simulator screen is not in center but left aligned

  • bluetooth device pair failing with ““Invalid arguments in method call””

  • webkit-clutter-javascriptcore: run-javascriptcore-tests fails

  • Mildenhall compositor crops windows

  • Upstream: linux-tools-generic should depend on lsb-release

  • Remove unnecessary folks package dependencies for automated tests