Subject: Re: Browsers on NetBSD sparc
To: Brett Lymn <blymn@baesystems.com.au>
From: Michael Lorenz <macallan@netbsd.org>
List: port-sparc
Date: 05/30/2005 09:10:00
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Hello,

> > See above. But since mozilla fails with a bus error here I guess
> > it's still 64bit-related.
> >=20
>=20
> Well, it could still be a sparc64 related issue but I can say for
> certain that it runs fine on amd64 so I don't think it is a generic
> 64-bit problem (maybe an endian bug though :)

Ok, I meant 64bit alignment constraint violations - SPARCs require
natural alignment for all memory accesses, so the popular game of
passing an int* for a size_t* is pretty likely to blow up with a bus
error on sparc64, but these won't bite you ;)
On the other hand, lots of gtk-applications like to cast ints to
pointers and the other way around - this would likely bite all 64bit
architectures, at least when running 64bit binaries.

I don't think there are many endianness bugs left in gecko - it runs
fine on MacOS X for ages, same goes for Solaris. The PowerPC-specific
code seems to blow up on macppc ( /weird/ rendering errors but no more
crashes than on MacOS X ), on sparc64 I don't see any of these rendering
problems.=20

And about libfontconfig and friends - putting something like this into
your mk.conf may help:
USE_BUILTIN.fontconfig?=3Dyes
PREFER_fontconfig?=3Dnative

this should keep pkgsrc from building its own libfontconfig and make it
use the one that comes with X. I guess the crashes come from compiling
with the headers from one libfontconfig but linking against the other
for whatever reason. Of course you'd have to recompile everything using
libfontconfig so its usefulness may be limited. Something similar for
Xft2 and freetype2 would probably be a good idea too. since these
libraries depend on each other.

have fun
Michael

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