Firefox 71 on POWER
Firefox 71 is out, not a major system upgrade, but some nice milestones such as improved developer tools, support for Media Session and native MP3 decoding. It pretty much works as is on Power ISA and I've noticed no new issues with it so far. (UPDATE: See comments. Apparently the extensions I'm using are unaffected by bug 1601424. However, this looks like a general Linux issue on all architectures.) The configurations I am using are unchanged from Firefox 67.
This is the last of the 6-week sprints, moving to a 4-week cadence for Firefox 72. As a result I will be doing smoke test builds about every 10-14 days to ensure early regressions on Power are intercepted. Unfortunately I have not had time to do much more work on the JIT because of the holidays, family responsibilities and $DAYJOB. I won't be offended at all if someone beats me to the punch especially as I'm starting to see WebAssembly becoming a hard dependency even for some add-ons (without the JIT there is no support for wasm).
There is currently a major issue with FF71 affecting all distros that compile it with gcc (e.g. void, fedora) breaking some notable extensions: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601424
ReplyDeleteI haven't encountered that myself, but it's entirely possible the relatively small set of extensions I use aren't affected. Alternatively, I don't build with PGO or LTO (too many other issues) and it looks like the affected builds are. It looks like some sort of patch is in https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1601707
DeleteWe don't either. PGO/LTO builds just outright crash. But regular builds with gcc are still affected and have the extensions broken (manifesting in different ways, like not being able to log in). Official Mozilla builds are unaffected because they're built with Clang. The patch is incomplete, it does not solve the problem with the extensions, just PGO/LTO crashes.
DeleteI haven't had much luck building Firefox with clang on this Talos myself.
DeleteThere were issues with earlier FF 71 builds in Fedora (non-functional extension, etc.), but firefox-71.0-15 should be OK, at least it is for me on F-30.
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