Re: Firefox52 broken on NetBSD9.3 / pkgsrc-2022Q4

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, 18 Mar 2023 at 22:09, Connor McLaughlan <cont6pro3%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> I found the problem!
>
> It seems a certain thread of firefox52 is crashing without notice
> leading to the error and I finally found the cause after replacing
> almost the whole dependency tree it occurred to me that neither the
> dependencies nor the firefox pkgversion might be the cause.
> Searching through the pkgsrc-2021Q4 release notes i found that
> hardening was elevated and more hardening was enabled exactly in this
> release where the problems seems to have started.
>
> Release notes tell:
> " - PKGSRC_USE_MKPIE was enabled on some architectures.  Packages that
>    provide static libraries to other packages should be rebuilt with
>    MKPIE enabled.  Some packages may experience runtime errors on
>    platforms like i386 - usually this is due to unsafe assembly code,
>    which should be disabled when MKPIE is enabled.
>  - PKGSRC_USE_SSP was bumped from "yes" to "strong".  This is not
>    expected to have a noticable effect."
>
> So i searched for how to disable those when experiencing runtime
> errors and found this webpage:
> https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/hardening.html#hardening.caveats.pie
>
> I added all workarounds as told to mozilla-common.mk before .include
> "../../mk/bsd.prefs.mk":
> MKPIE_SUPPORTED= no
> FORTIFY_SUPPORTED= no
> RELRO_SUPPORTED= no
> SSP_SUPPORTED= no
>
> And after recompiling firefox52 it is working again!
> I possibly overshot here..possibly only SSP and/or MKPIE need to be disabled.
>
> So how to proceed from here? It seems not only firefox52 is affected
> on sparc64, but also thunderbird52 and possibly other packages...

Excellent catch. We can definitely disable the appropriate options on
sparc64 (with a nice comment in the Makefiles for the future curious
:)

Would you be willing to run another couple of tests to find exactly
which need to be disabled?

Thanks!

David