Re: Seems I have bad timing with Debian on SPARC.

On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Bernhard R. Link <brlink@debian.org> wrote:

* Howard Eisenberger <howarde@gmx.net> [131004 20:20]:

> (2) "Bus error" with iceweasel and iceape. I believe it's been
> like this for a couple of years now.

Those are big problems and getting them bug free can be a big task,
though sparc is really good to catch the bugs here. A valid C program
cannot cause a bus error on sparc and an invalid C program is likely
to fail also on other architectures whenever the compiler adds new
optimisations. So fixing those bugs will benefit everyone.

That's the theory. In reality, maintainers of large and complex software projects (like mozilla/firefox) do not really care about fringe architectures, and I don't see why this situation would improve with time. A pragmatic (but less conceptually-correct) approach would be to convince sparc kernel maintainers to introduce unaligned memory access handling for userspace programs. That would incur a penalty every time an unaligned access happens, but, in my opinion, it's better to have a slow-but-working binary than the one which crashes all the time. The code for handling unaligned memory accesses for kernel code already exists, so I don't think it would be too big of a challenge for someone who knows their way around kernel code.

On a related note, I posted a patch to http://bugs.debian.org/674908 (was RC, but eventually got tagged wheezy-ignore) which allowed me to browse some _javascript_-heavy sites.

Bernhard R. Link

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Jurij Smakov | jurij@wooyd.org | Key IDs: 43C30A7D/C99E03CC