#647: scheduler.postTask()

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Opened Jun 14, 2021

Ya ya yawm TAG!

I'm requesting a TAG review of scheduler.postTask().

Userspace tasks often have varying degrees of importance (related to user experience), but the Platform lacks a unified API to schedule and control prioritized work; scheduler.postTask() provides this functionality.

Further details:

  • I have reviewed the TAG's Web Platform Design Principles
  • Relevant time constraints or deadlines: We hope to ship this API in Chrome version M93
  • The group where the work on this specification is currently being done: WebPerf WG
  • The group where standardization of this work is intended to be done (if current group is a community group or other incubation venue):
  • Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification:
  • This work is being funded by: Google

You should also know that...

  1. The previous TAG review for this work (pre-spec) can be found here. Two things that changed have since that review:
    1. Removal of callback arguments
    2. Addition of previousPriority to priority change events
  2. We would appreciate TAG feedback on this open issue

We'd prefer the TAG provide feedback as (please delete all but the desired option):

🐛 open issues in our GitHub repo for each point of feedback


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Discussions

2021-06-28

Minutes

Punted

2021-08-30

Minutes

Sangwhan: the use case makes sense...

Ken: completed origin trial in 93 and now available by default in chrome

Dan: looking at responses to security and privacy. The question about data features expose to an origin..

Sangwhan: this is the ugly thing... competing with cpu time for other things in the browser. You could pull it off in chromeos where the browser is the only thing that's running?

Dan: they say information gained is likely to be benign but i'm not sure what information the're talking about

Sangwhan: CPU usage... imagine .. one listening to compute pressure and the other post burst tasks that run through loops in a specific pattern.. could mitigate in the implementation

Dan: we could feed back that they need to suggest mitigations

Sangwhan: it's a stretch. You could do this without this api

Ken: very highly unlikely and unrelable side channel

Dan: they actually have a mitigations section in the spec, and talk about what information might be gained. I think this is good. I think we should close it.

Sangwhan: [leaves closing comment]