On 13/5/25 6:08 am, Ken Cunningham wrote:
It's challenging to debug firefox. I have 3.5G of RAM, and I added an 8G swapfile, and with that firefox will run under gdb but it takes 15-18 minutes for firefox to start. It uses a lot of swapfile.
That's a long time. When I first tested it under gdb I found my HDD thrashing because I had left an old swap partition active. Or actually the installer would have picked it up. I setup an SSD that I've dedicated to Linux installs but didn't add a swap partition too. Do you run it from SSD?
I did add swap to my SSD but managed to install 8GB to my machine so I could load it into pure memory. That reduces it to around 2 minutes load time. Should time it.
Then when you start interacting with is (eg ask it to open a website) it does a hard crash and locks up the system, with no opportunity to backtrace. Turns out gdb logging is off by default -- I'll turn that on and see if I can capture anything before it downs the system.
Do you have any way of attaching a terminal? My system has a serial port so it's easy enough for me to do it the "old fashioned" way over serial cable with a "console=ttyS0" added to my kernel command line. Don't know if a G5 Mac USB supports but I found USB2/3 has a debug feature that's pretty much a modern drop in replacement for a serial port link. Just needs activating in kernel and the right USB cable. So kinda like the old way as you need a modern USB null modem cable now. :-)
-- My regards, Damien Stewart.