On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 19:51:52 -0400 Michael Lorenz wrote:

>> So, if I understand you correctly, Firefox 2.x now works on sparc64
>> systems (I assume only on -current)? That's excellent news - my  last
>> few attempts to use it were dismal failures (it usually died with a bus
>> error at startup).
>
> When Andy switched our threading support over to his 1:1 code firefox  
> suddenly worked on sparc64 and excessive rendering bugs on macppc  
> disappeared.

This leaves a *lot* of room for speculation. :-)

Lots of people seem to think that Firefox isn't 64bit clean (yet) and
therefore cannot work with real 64bit CPUs that aren't as permissive as
AMD64. If only the threading model was changed, then the question seems to
be: What is the real problem? Firefox isn't threading clean? Is there such
thing?

Threading as 1:1 isn't really that desirable. Normally you'd want one
kernel thread to serve more than one userland thread. The FreeBSD team put
a lot of work into the kernel to get exactly this result. This could
actually mean that the current software isn't yet ready to today's
operating systems. An OS is a terrible thing to waste! Who would want to
run ICQ on a cray?

Regards,
Chris