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Mozilla on Docker, COVID Surveillance and Rust

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 7th of May 2020 03:37:12 AM Filed under
Development
Moz/FF
  • Dustin J. Mitchell: Debugging Docker Connection Reset by Peer

    At the end of January this year the Taskcluster team was alerted to networking issues in a user’s tasks. The first report involved ETIMEDOUT but later on it became clear that the more frequent issue was involving ECONNRESET in the middle of downloading artifacts necessary to run the tests in the tasks. It seemed it was only occurring on downloads from Google (https://dl.google.com) on our workers running in GCP, and only with relatively large artifacts. This led us to initially blame some bit of infrastructure outside of Taskcluster but eventually we found the issue to be with how Docker was handling networking on our worker machines.

  • More on COVID Surveillance: Mobile Phone Location

    Previously I wrote about the use of mobile apps for COVID contact tracing. This idea has gotten a lot of attention in the tech press — probably because there are some quite interesting privacy issues — but there is another approach to monitoring people’s locations using their devices that has already been used in Taiwan and Israel, namely mobile phone location data. While this isn’t something that people think about a lot, your mobile phone has to be in constant contact with the mobile system and the system can use that information to determine your location. Mobile phones already use network-based location to provide emergency location services and for what’s called assisted GPS, in which mobile-tower based location is used along with satellite-based GPS, but it can, of course, be used for services the user might be less excited about, such as real-time surveillance of their location. In addition to measurements taken from the tower, a number of mobile services share location history with service providers, for instance to provide directions in mapping applications or as part of your Google account.

    If what you are trying to do is as much COVID surveillance as cheaply as possible, this kind of data has several big advantages over mobile phone apps. First, it’s already being collected, so you don’t need to get anyone to install an app. Second, it’s extremely detailed because it has everyone’s location and not just who they have been in contact with. The primary disadvantage of mobile phone location data is accuracy; in some absolute sense, assisted GPS is amazingly accurate, especially to those old enough to remember when handheld GPS was barely a thing, but generally we’re talking about accuracies to the scale of meters to tens of meters, which is not good enough to tell whether you have been in close contact with someone. This is still useful enough for many applications and we’re seeing this kind of data used for a number of anti-COVID purposes such as detecting people crowding in a given location, determining when people have broken quarantine and measuring bulk movements.

  • How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2020

    I last wrote in December 2019 about my work on speeding up the Rust compiler. Time for another update.

    [...]

    Last year I noticed from profiles that rustc spends some time compressing the LLVM bitcode it produces, especially for debug builds. I tried changing it to not compress the bitcode, and that gave some small speed-ups, but also increased the size of compiled artifacts on disk significantly.

    Then Alex Crichton told me something important: the compiler always produces both object code and bitcode for crates. The object code is used when compiling normally, and the bitcode is used when compiling with link-time optimization (LTO), which is rare. A user is only ever doing one or the other, so producing both kinds of code is typically a waste of time and disk space.

    In #66598 I tried a simple fix for this: add a new flag to rustc that tells it to omit the LLVM bitcode. Cargo could then use this flag whenever LTO wasn’t being used. After some discussion we decided it was too simplistic, and filed issue #66961 for a more extensive change. That involved getting rid of the use of compressed bitcode by instead storing uncompressed bitcode in a section in the object code (a standard format used by clang), and introducing the flag for Cargo to use to disable the production of bitcode.

    The part of rustc that deals with all this was messy. The compiler can produce many different kinds of output: assembly code, object code, LLVM IR, and LLVM bitcode in a couple of possible formats. Some of these outputs are dependent on other outputs, and the choices on what to produce depend on various command line options, as well as details of the particular target platform. The internal state used to track output production relied on many boolean values, and various nonsensical combinations of these boolean values were possible.

»

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