SGI: Development

This weekend I had some time to have a look on gtk2 and ff3.5. I also build a ff3.5 depending on tgcware instead of nekoware. It crashes in exactly the same way Dexter experienced many years ago. Since this problem occurs with gcc and mipspro and also with nekoware and tgcware, we can be quite sure this is not a problem of the compiler or any of the dependencies. The earliest ff3.1 beta releases also crashes in the same way,

edit: I removed my wrong gtk2 information. gtk2.18 is not running correctly with firefox.

diegel wrote: I also build a ff3.5 depending on tgcware instead of nekoware. It crashes in exactly the same way Dexter experienced many years ago. Since this problem occurs with gcc and mipspro and also with nekoware and tgcware, we can be quite sure this is not a problem of the compiler or any of the dependencies. The earliest ff3.1 beta releases also crashes in the same way,

Proper coding skills, Diegel! Are you referring to that Bus Error i got when runing Firefox 3.5 some years ago?

Back then i couldn't get my head around as to where the problem was. Good to see that it is not glib/gtk but most likely the actual ff3.5 C++ source. If i remember properly, it has something to do with a misaligned cast of a structure, which is usually the case when Bus Error's occur on IRIX/MIPSPro platforms. See the xcircuit thread for a recent example, and that one was relatively easy (int <-> bool)

I must warn you though, this one is particularly hard to debug.

Unfortunately, this bug is all Chinese to me...

MIPS N32 firefox's bus error problem and solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnSojgPg5kc

jimmer wrote: Unfortunately, this bug is all Chinese to me...

MIPS N32 firefox's bus error problem and solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnSojgPg5kc

This leads to: http://r0bertz.blogspot.nl/2009/04/mips-n32-firefox-in-acid3-test.html

Which leads to https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/loongson-dev/xgCC2ukKygU/FB1_ge3l_OMJ

Which leads to a patch http://code.openhub.net/file?fid=NjowB5niPqOXxkL0xlgWIH41MZY&cid=1d9defo44NY&s=

And that is not Chinese and actually very very interesting!!! Not sure we can use this for Firefox 3.x in IRIX, but now i understand the code a bit better.

You, sir Jimmer, got yourself a free beer!

FF3 bus errors are fixed, we have a running ff3 version now and some of these patches are part of the current version. ff3.5 and later have a different problems: it terminates during startup with an assignment error. I had a look at the patches of Zhang Le, who get ff3.5 running on a linux version for Loongson CPUs. He transformed the n32 stuff we already using for Irix to linux .

Thanks Diegel. Since this is all from 2009 it makes sense that much of this has already been part of the ff3.x code.
I'll try to look into it when i have some more time.