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Crash statistics for KWin

KWin is one of those parts of the KDE workspace which receives crash parts for all parts of the stack. We see crashes in Plasma (kind of upstream to us), Qt and most likely in the graphics drivers and X itself. My subjective feeling was that we receive more for us useless crash reports than valid ones. So I just used the bugzilla search to get some numbers for the last year (August 1st, 2009 till today). As you should not trust any statistics you haven’t faked yourself, I used the search to set some more bugs to upstream, duplicate and so on 😉

  • Reported crashes: 330
  • Still open: 31
  • Fixed: 47
  • Set to duplicate: 159 (~ 50 %)
  • Upstream bug: 44
  • Missing backtrace: 37
  • Other (waiting for info, Compiz bug, etc): 12

What’s really bad is that half of the reported crashes are duplicates. And that’s although DrKonqui finds the right reports. In most cases I just copy&paste the bug number reported as a possible duplicate (thanks a lot for this feature). Among those duplicates we have one issue during the 4.4 cycle which caused 31 duplicates and which is now on number two of crashes with most duplicates. In lead is still the crash report for Compiz’ KDE4-Window-Decorator (I said we get crashes for the complete stack including competitive window managers 😀 ).

The upstream bugs are mostly driver related bugs. The number does not reflect reality perfectly as some driver crashes are set to duplicate. So we see that we have more crashes in drivers than crashes we fixed! The open bugs contain mostly crash reports where I think that they are also not valid, e.g. crash in malloc. Most of them are also missing a way to reproduce the crash or it is clearly wrong (yes kwin backtraces can tell what you were doing 😉

Oh and we could use a bug day. Since I started to work I don’t have the time any more to search for duplicates and the number of open bugs has increased by > 60 since the 4.4 release. And yes also those are mostly duplicates. It just needs someone to filter them 🙁

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Beautiful Screenshots

This weekend I finally sat down and wrote a screenshot effect for KWin. This effect redirects the rendering of any window into an off-screen texture and saves the texture into the home directory. The advantage of this effect is that it is hooked into the normal rendering process and so we can also capture the shadow and the translucency to get beautiful screenshots. If we capture a transparent window it does not show the windows below but only the captured window with the alpha channel turned on correctly. See for example:

Translucent Konsole with Oxygen shadows

Of course the effect is not meant to replace KSnapshot. Instead I prepared a patch which allows KSnapshot to use this effect when the user selected window under mouse cursor. The screenshot shown above was captured with this change to KSnapshot. I hope I will be able to merge this change, soon 🙂

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