How to Branch and Roll Chromium's ANGLE Dependency

ANGLE provides an implementation of OpenGL ES on Windows, which Chromium relies upon for hardware accelerated rendering and WebGL support. Chromium specifies its dependency on a specific version of ANGLE in the repository; this document describes how to update that dependency, and, if necessary, create an ANGLE branch to correspond to a branched release of Chrome.

ANGLE‘s commit queue also runs browser-level tests which are hosted in the Chromium repository. To reduce the chance of a Chromium-side change breaking ANGLE’s CQ, the version of Chromium against which ANGLE changes is also snapshotted, and rolled forward into ANGLE with appropriate testing.

Autorollers

At present, autorollers manage both the ANGLE roll into Chromium, and the Chromium roll into ANGLE. All of the ANGLE-related autorollers are documented in the ANGLE Wrangling documentation.

Manually rolling DEPS

Chromium's dependency on third-party projects is tracked in the Chromium repository's src/DEPS file. To update the ANGLE dependency:

  • Find the line in this file that defines “src/third_party/angle” for deps (not deps_os)
  • Change the git SHA-1 revision number to be that of the commit on which Chromium should depend. Please use the full SHA-1, not a shortened version.
  • You can find the SHA-1 for a particular commit with git log on the appropriate branch of the repository, or via the public repository viewer.
  • If using the public repository viewer, you will need to select the branch whose log you wish to view from the list on the left-hand side, and then click on the “tree” link at the top of the resulting page. Alternatively, you can navigate to https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle/+/<branch name>/ -- including the terminating forward slash. (e.g. https://chromium.googlesource.com/angle/angle/+/main/)

Branching ANGLE

Sometimes, individual changes to ANGLE are needed for a release of Chrome which has already been branched. If this is the case, a branch of ANGLE should be created to correspond to the Chrome release version, so that Chrome may incorporate only these changes, and not everything that has been committed since the version on which Chrome depended at branch time. Please note: Only ANGLE admins can create a new branch. To create a branch of ANGLE for a branched Chrome release:

  • Determine what the ANGLE dependency is for the Chrome release by checking the DEPS file for that branch.
  • Check out this commit as a new branch in your local repository.
    • e.g., for the Chrome 34 release at chrome/branches/1847, the ANGLE version is 4df02c1ed5e97dd54576b06964b1da67ea30238e. To check this commit out locally and create a new branch named ‘mybranch’ from this commit, use: git checkout -b mybranch 4df02c1ed5e97dd54576b06964b1da67ea30238e
  • To create this new branch in the public repository, you'll need to push the branch to the special Gerrit reference location, ‘refs/heads/’. You must be an ANGLE administrator to be able to push this new branch.
    • e.g., to use your local ‘mybranch’ to create a branch in the public repository called ‘chrome_m34’, use: git push origin mybranch:refs/heads/chrome_m34
    • The naming convention that ANGLE uses for its release-dedicated branches is ‘chrome_m##’.