Background

Samsung Internet, a Chromium-based browser, has been an integral part of Samsung's product lineup, requiring robust and efficient build infrastructure to keep up with its evolving complexity. With a need for more advanced solutions due to increasing build complexity and domain variety, the Samsung Internet team sought a tool that could provide remote execution and build caching at scale.

Challenges

• Increased build complexity - The heterogeneous nature of Samsung Internet's builds required a solution capable of handling complex compositions across different executors.

• Inefficient ad-hoc solutions - Existing ad-hoc solutions were becoming inefficient and unscalable with the expanding variety and complexity of build domains.

• Need for remote execution - The team needed a remote execution solution to manage build complexity efficiently and to push tasks to the most appropriate execution environments.

  
  

Solution

Samsung Internet adopted NativeLink to address these challenges, leveraging its remote execution backend and build caching capabilities. This integration enabled Samsung to streamline their build processes and significantly reduce build times.

Implementation

• Remote execution and build caching - NativeLink's robust architecture allowed Samsung Internet to efficiently manage their build processes by utilizing remote execution and build caching. This not only simplified their infrastructure but also made it more scalable.

• Scalable infrastructure - NativeLink's ability to scale across commodity hardware allowed Samsung Internet to optimize their build processes and push tasks to the most efficient execution environments.

• Improved efficiency - The integration of NativeLink brought down the engineering time and simplified the inspection of infrastructure, making it easier to manage builds across various domains.

  
  

Results

• Reduced build times - The implementation of NativeLink reduced Samsung Internet's build times from several days to just one to two hours. This significant improvement allowed the team to work more efficiently and effectively.

• Simulated system behavior on specialized bare metal hardware - Running the original builds on specialized hardware without any build acceleration took days. Using NativeLink’s segmented solution, Samsung Internet was able to reduce this time dramatically, highlighting the efficiency and scalability of the tool.

• Enhanced scalability - The scalable nature of NativeLink's infrastructure enabled Samsung Internet to handle increased build complexity and domain variety without compromising on efficiency.

• Future-proofing development - By adopting NativeLink, Samsung Internet positioned itself to better handle future development needs, especially with the potential to improve storage density and overall system efficiency.

  
  

Conclusion

The adoption of NativeLink by Samsung Internet has proven to be a game-changer, enabling the team to efficiently manage complex builds, reduce build times, and scale their infrastructure effectively. This integration highlights the potential of NativeLink to significantly enhance development processes for large-scale projects.

To learn more about NativeLink, read our documentation, check out our GitHub repo, or contact our team directly at hello@nativelink.com.