RFH: Android support in Apitrace

[Mark Janes]

José Fonseca <jose.r.fonseca at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Another area of Apitrace I'm struggling with is Android support, because:
>
> - I don't have a feeling if / how much it actually matters to users

FWIW, engineers working on Android at Intel would like to capture traces
from Android to analyze with FrameRetrace.  Support for the Android App
store in ChromeOS makes a huge number of titles playable on Mesa, and we
hope to find and fix performance issues with these workloads.

FrameRetrace needs a lot of work to support retracing on an android
device, but I'm hopeful that the traces can be analyzed on standard
Linux platforms.

> - I have no idea if it even works or not
>
> I'm afraid the status quo is unbearable, whereby Android support is
> officially advertised, but users keep complaining issues building/using it,
> and I can't help nor even tell them whether it's supposed to work.
>
> Finally, there are alternatives for Android out there.  In particular
> Google seems to be actively working on https://github.com/google/gapid
>
>
> So my plan is to:
>
> 1) start advertising that Android is no longer supported (still allow the
> build, but place loud warnings)
>
> 2) yank out support completely after some time (a month at max)
>
>
> If by any chance Android still matters and works (or can be easily made to
> work), then I'm counting on people to step up and give a hand to make
> supporting it viable.
>
> To halt (or revert) the Android deprecation process I'll need the following:
>
> 1) up-to-date instructions on how to build and use with recent Android
> versions / SDKs
>
> 2) a Travis-CI build for Android (if somebody helps with item 1 I can help
> with this item 2)
>
> 3) a very simple sanity test case using an Android emulator (Hopefully a
> test that can be run from Travis-CI job too, but that can wait.  As long as
> any Android user can easily run that test locally and verify things work
> minimally I'm happy.)  I don't have experience with Android, nor the
> need/time to learn now, so I'll be relying totally on the community for
> this one too.

I will ask our engineers if they are willing to help with this work.

> I don't think these requests are too much to ask if Android truly matters.
>
> Jose
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