Re: Mozilla Software on Sparc64/Linux
Hi,
commenting to this topic. I was able to first fix and then upgrade my faitfhul Ultra 2 (*). Equipped now with 2x 396 MHz processors and 1GB of RAM, running NetBSD 9 I could for the first time "dare" to install firefox 52 esr, with all the patches done for it by Martin. I am quite impressed: it has no immediately apparent Endianness issues and is capable of browsing without crashing, even performance is acceptable, although of course JS itself is slow. I cannot fully assert speed, since current versions of Xorg are quite slow on the Creator card, as if it running without even 2D acceleration (moving and scrolling is bad, but even with xterm). Images, fonts, interface all display fine. The only broken thing are image operations, but this is a long-standing issue that affects also ArcticFox. So all-in-all that FF version is more modern than AF39 and has no more issue (compared to non-patched official releases).
I did not find any rust-basef FFs in NetBSD packages, so I couldn't compare.
My only comparison is recent Firefox on Debian running on 64Bit ppc and that one is unusable with a broken interface and incredible slowness, but didn't test it on SPARC, I only have my T2000 running and I guess that on NIagara it could take minutes just to start! Should ? (however since it has e10s, t should be able to exploit the multi-cores later on)
Riccardo
(*) Some story of the breakage which might be of interest for others running vintage Sun hardware.
The machine first smoked badly that I feared a broken MB and PSU! But by careful disassembly I was able to determine that the disk drive was so badly shorted that it brought down everything. Put hot-swap in a server it did shut it down immediatley! Fixed that… it would not boot and die during POST! Damage? I was worried. But no - the NVRAM chip was so "dead". With a dead battery the computer usually comes up, here not. I got a new chip and with that one it the computer starts perfectly! I don't know if it was damaged by the power issues or died…
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