I use Fedora instead of the recommended Ubuntu distribution. My main motivation is that Fedora generally ships newer packages than Ubuntu, so I get to try out newer versions of software earlier than most people. In the context of Chromium and Blink development, this means I'm more likely to catch bugs like this one.

This is a list of the steps I did to be able to run Blink's layout tests on Fedora Linux. Layout tests are currently main method of testing in Blink, so being able to run them is a pretty hard prerequisite to working on patches.

Build Prerequisites

The Fedora Setup section of the Linux build prerequisites in the Chromium wiki has two commands that can be conveniently copy-pasted to get most of the packages needed for building Chromium. The optional packages are needed for running Blink's layout tests, so make sure you run both commands.

The comments section also has a list of packages that should be installed, and somewhat makes up for the fact that the Chromium codebase evolves much faster than the Wiki page.

After installing all the packages, you should be able to build the blink_tests target, which contains the Content Shell and all the tools used to run the layout tests.

cd ~/chromium/src

ninja -C out/Debug blink_tests

Fonts for the Layout Tests

The layout tests refuse to run without the fonts used by the pixel tests. The font list and lookup details are in src/content/shell/app/webkit_test_platform_support_linux.cc. If the path above changes, try searching the codebase for kochi-gothic.ttf.

The easiest method for obtaining the needed fonts is:

  1. Download an Ubuntu desktop ISO.

  2. Use VirtualBox (or your favorite alternative) to set up an Ubuntu VM.

  3. Open up the Ubuntu Setup section in a browser in the VM.

  4. Install the font-related packages (look for font or ttf in the package name) in the VM.

  5. Copy the entire /usr/share/fonts/truetype directory to your Fedora installation.

    mkdir ~/Downloads/ChromiumFonts
scp -r you@vmname.local:/usr/share/fonts/truetype ~/Downloads/ChromiumFonts
sudo cp -r ~/Downloads/Chromiumfonts/truetype /usr/share/fonts

  6. Check that the layout tests are happy with your font setup.

    cd ~/chromium/src
out/Debug/content_shell --dump-render-tree ~/chromium/src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests/fast/js/array-indexof.html

  7. Stash the fonts in your Dropbox or Google Drive, so you won't have to do this again.

  8. Power off and remove the Ubuntu VM.

For whatever it's worth, the Microsoft fonts can be easily obtained by installing the RPM from the mscorefonts2 project. However, a reasonably thorough search for koichi-gothic.ttf led to no results, so the Ubuntu VM method is the fastest method I know for getting all the fonts.

Story: Debugging a Crash in the Layout Tests Crash

On one occasion, all the layout tests that I ran resulted in crashes. The steps I took might be helpful for shedding light on a similar situation.

First, I first found an "easy" test that really shouldn't crash the renderer, so I wouldn't have to worry about whether the crash was introduced by a recent change. My test was fast/js/array-indexof.html, but other tests in that directory might be equally suitable.

Running the test with the extra --driver-logging option revealed the issue. (I was missing fonts.)

webkit/tools/layout_tests/run_webkit_tests.sh --debug --driver-logging fast/js/array-indexof.html

Had that not worked, I would have ran the test in the Content Shell directly. Note that unlike the full Chromium build, the Content Shell can't convert relative paths into URLs, so I'm giving it a full path. I'm relying on bash to expand ~ to my home directory.

out/Debug/content_shell ~/chromium/src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests/fast/js/array-indexof.html

In my case, this command worked, and showed me that the problem was somewhere in the testing infrastructure, so I ran the test with the --dump-render-tree flag.

out/Debug/content_shell --dump-render-tree ~/chromium/src/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests/fast/js/array-indexof.html