Porting/Firefox

This page details the efforts to port Firefox to PowerPC/POWER.

Legend: 'Both' means both BE and LE benefit from the fix. 'BE' means the issue is specific to Big Endian; 'LE' means the issue is specific to Little Endian.

Finished

• Both Implement XPIDL calls with implicit_jscontext on PPC64
• BE JavaScript engine crashes due to double endian conversion
• BE Graphics swizzling code is wrong on BE

In progress

• BE ESR60 only: JS brokenness
• BE ESR60 only: No graphic output

Needs work

• BE Skia colours are backwards in some cases (XXX: seems like it's specific to <canvas/>?)
• BE FFmpeg overlays cause assertion because RGBX data is endian-shifted wrongly
• Both? More acceleration with AltiVec / optional VSX / etc

JIT

The Firefox JIT (IonMonkey) needs to be ported to all sorts of POWER. The most important targets are PPC64 BE (Adélie, FreeBSD, Gentoo) and PPC64 LE (Debian, Fedora). PPC32 BE would be useful for the community, in addition to those who want to run a 32-bit userland on 64-bit kernel on Talos - this can save memory and perform a little faster depending on workloads, and is officially supported by Debian.

BE is being actively investigated by awilfox and the Adélie people; LE is being planned by Cameron KaiserTenFourFox issue where a POWER8 LE JIT for Linux is mentioned as "planning"..

Build instructions

This is how awilfox is building Firefox central (equivalent to Mozilla's Firefox Nightly, previously known as "Aurora" builds).