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Re: etch --> lenny upgrade report on Alpha platform




On 17/10/2008, at 3:56 PM, Bob Tracy wrote:

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 11:07:17PM +1300, Michael Cree wrote:
Bob Tracy wrote:
Someone asked me why I don't try "iceweasel".  I have...  Version
3.0.1-1 bombs consistently with an illegal instruction,

Yes, I have the same problem. Iceweasel 3.0.1-1 crashes on invocation. I see a similar problem was reported for x64, Debian bug #492488, so I added
a backtrace of the iceweasel crash on Alpha to that bug report.

Very cool.  Thanks for the input.  For what it's worth, 3.0.3-2 hit
"testing" sometime in the past few days: the update was downloaded and
installed last night.  Unfortunately, the crash on invocation is still
happening.

Trying to roll my own "firefox 3" has been educational to say the least.

Yeah, I also tried to compile firefox from source, and after noting the completely non-standard build, the confusing options in the configure script, and the lack of installation instructions, my reaction was WTF and gave up.

I've also tried to build GNU icecat, the FSF's modified firefox. I think it links xulrunner statically, and after making a couple of changes to the Makefiles (to correctly include some Alpha specific code since it misdetected my Alpha, and to turn off -Werror on a module so that compilation can continue) it fails on the final linking stage with gprel errors, and that some library has objects that it can't relocate or something (I'm working off memory here).

Looking at the Alpha compiler options in the gcc manual I see there is mention of "small data area" where data are accessed via 16-bit references from the $gp register. So I tried inserting -mlarge-data options to the compilation in the hope it might fix it, but still got the relocation errors at linking. I understand what "16-bit relative addressing" means, but I don't really understand (from the gcc manual) what the options to modify compilation to use different data referencing schemes are really doing, and what one can do to avoid getting gprel relocation errors (my reading of the gcc manual suggested that -mlarge-data should've worked).

Cheers
Michael.


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