From Second Life Wiki

Contents 1 Objectives 2 See Also 3 Tasks 3.1 Phase 1 3.1.1 Test Plan 3.2 Phase 2 3.3 Phase 3 3.3.1 LLViewerLogin 3.3.2 Eliminate startup.cpp 3.3.3 Lightweight Client

Objectives

• Improve the stability and maintainability of the Second Life Viewer code by cleaning up the initialization and main loop code
• Move the main loop to a separate thread so that infinite loops can be detected and debugged

See Also

• Viewer Roadmap

Tasks

Phase 1

• Create a LLAppViewer class based on LLApp
  • Move class initialization and parameter parsing to LLAppViewer
  • Move all error handling to LLAppViewer (errors set a flag and sleep, LLAppViewer generates the exception)
  • Move all debug/info/warning/error text printing to LLAppViewer
    • Print text to a buffer instead of stdio
    • Send the buffer to stdio in LLAppViewer loop
    • Use a proper window for viewing console text in the Viewer
    • Move unheeded warnings to debugs
    • Clean up info messages
• Create a LLViewerThread class based on LLThread
  • Move the main loop into LLViewerThread
• Eliminate viewer.cpp
  • Create proper C++ abstractions for any remaining code in viewer.cpp
• Add a 'watchdog' to LLAppViewer to detect infinite loops and trigger a crash
  • Each thread needs its own watchdog
    • Some thread, e.g. decode thread may be able to be safely restarted on OSX if they crash
  • Ensure that the crash handler generates proper stack information for LLViewerThread
  • Add a 'Debug > Test > Force Crash', 'Force Infinite Loop', and 'Force Deadlock' debug options

Test Plan

• Run Second Life on all platforms. Include all available hardware configurations (Intel, AMD, PPC, single processor, dual core, dual processor)
  • Run frame rate tests and ensure that frame rate is at least 95% of current client's frame rate
• Ensure that the Crash reporter still works
  • Test various crash scenarios:
    • Force a crash using the debug option.
    • Force an infinite loop using the debug option.
    • Force a deadlock using the debug option.
  • Ensure each crash triggers a report
    • Send the report numbers to Dev so they can ensure that the crashes have the correct call stack info
  • Test crashes on Windows, Mac, and Linux
• Use Client > Console > Debug Console to view debug messages while running
  • Ensure that they get displayed in order
• Scan the log file after a session and look for any warnings.
  • Report any warnings that show up.
  • Check for any unhelpful info messages

Phase 2

• Convert to LLSD the user settings in gSavedSettings stored in settings.xml
• LLControlDef.cpp manually sets a number of gSavedSettings - these should be read in, no longer compiled into the binary
• Support multiple directories for user settings (Enable multiple users/alt accounts to have different settings, even though they share the same computer.)
• Support multiple color settings -- i.e. per user

Also:

• Examine the global variables and find those which can be turned into system settings
• Examine command line parsing strategy and change if warranted
• Identify all non-command-parsing functionality that should be removed from viewer parse_args function

Phase 3

LLViewerLogin

• Abstract the login sequence into a class

Eliminate startup.cpp

• Create proper C++ abstractions for startup using LLViewerLogin

Lightweight Client

• Create a client that logs in to Second Life without running the 3D render pipeline