Re: Mozilla Software on Sparc64/Linux

Hi Adrian,

thank you for your time. This sounds a bit complicated for the newer versions.

Currently i don't know where to start.

I was trying to build the old firefox52 and thunderbird52 which run on NetBSD/Sparc64 from pkgsrc and manually. The thunderbird52 exists on debian and the firefox package did skip 52 and was only released as a 50 with error messages filling up the console. I can get them to build with pkgsrc and manually but some patches seem to be missing to avoid bus errors in libxul.so on debian.

Unfortunately i don't know yet how debian builds its own packages and where to find the patches used in those builds, so that i could reproduce the building of firefox50 and thunderbird52 to maybe learn something as a starting point.

Regards,

Connor

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 12:55 PM John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> wrote:

On 11/8/21 11:07, Rick Leir wrote:
> The reason that I think PPC is related is that, if it is also BE then PPC users may
> have solved some of the compatibility problems that we experience. I realize that
> there's a difference in this between PPC and Sparc; but some of the PPC fixes can
> at least suggest Sparc fixes as long as they have stayed BE. IBM is putting considerable
> effort into this.

The fundamental problem with Firefox and Thunderbird is that building both requires NodeJS.

There is no NodeJS for SPARC which is why you have to compile the _javascript_ sources on a
different architecture and then put them into the SPARC Firefox/Thunderbird packages, see:

> https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland/tree/master/components/desktop/firefox/wrapper-node

This has got nothing to do with big-endian vs. little-endian.

> I talked with an IBM consultant at the X11 conference in Montreal two years ago. But we didn't
> discuss Sparc. And I didn't discuss IBM changing to LE. Is it true?

IBM is supporting Linux on POWER both big- and little-endian. Their zSeries mainframes are BE
and so is AIX on POWER.

Big-endian is not going anywhere, doesn't matter what anyone on Phoronix or the LKML writes.

And it's not related to Firefox or Thunderbird on SPARC as explained above.

Adrian

--
.''`. John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
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`. `' Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de
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