Re: [gccsdk] alignment error in firefox2

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 10:22:59PM +0000, John Ballance wrote:
> Hi
>
> Testing firefox2 (the zip download, not a local build) on the imx
> platform shows an alignment error
>
> The stderr o/p is included. Being unfamiliar with this backtrace I
> can see the issue, but would appreciate pointing to the code that is
> a bother.

That's pretty early on - it starts its version of main() and then starts
mucking about with its environment variables, at which point it triggers an
alignment exception. That looks like it ends up being a signal that gets
raised, at which point UnixLib's trap handler gets called and gives up.
(Somebody who knows more than me please correct me here)

I'd guess Firefox is built with unaligned loads, which would be the cause of
the problem.

Building Firefox is awkward because:
Versions of Firefox >=3 dropped the Xlib backend that uses ChoX11 on RISC OS
- so we're stuck with Firefox 2 unless someone ports a modern rendering
library
Firefox has a huge list of dependencies, many of which themselves have
moved on for one reason or another.
Not only may those dependencies not build, once built they could be
incompatible with FF 2 in some way (that the FF folks have zero interest in
fixing)

So a build means getting the exact versions of libraries contemporary with
FF 2 and building those in turn. That's quite awkward and difficult to
maintain. There could be some merit in using upstream sources from Ubuntu
9.04 or whatever, but it might need a dedicated autobuilder setup - and
might have to backdate the autobuilder checkout to match.

Theo

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