Messages

1

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 25, 2026, 09:15:12 pm »

nodejs npm still not available on debian sid ppc64 which Firefox-BE is asking on compile.

Yes i can access you to my powermac-g5.

You could use nodejs in the PPC64LE box to workaround that, the PR description has full instructions

please send me the access details via Private Messages

2

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 25, 2026, 09:14:38 pm »

btw, https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox-ppc64/releases/tag/FIREFOX_154_0_1_RELEASE_PPC64 is out

3

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 25, 2026, 04:52:12 pm »

So i not get completed the FF_BE compile on PowermacG5 because missing a lot dependencies on debian powerpc, however i started the FF_LE test build on raptor-blackbird before to patch and build my favorite browser gnu icecat. I will report any news abouts.

Today also compiled gnu gnulinux 7.2 to test nouveau on 64kpagesize support, which still do not  work from promised 6.18, it just fixed the panic so no more freeze but still no video but i also checking if it need a special libdrm version on compile, just in case.

I have no real hardware G5 to test. However I could assure you that it compiles successfully on Debian Sid running in VM on my raptor blackbird box. Have you read the `Build` section in PR description https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox-ppc64/pull/2

If you do not mind, please grant me access to your G5, my public key is https://gist.github.com/runlevel5/82a44eefa9239b627605f86f3c337919 I will see what I could help

4

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 17, 2026, 11:27:35 am »

https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox-ppc64/releases/tag/FIREFOX_154_0_RELEASE_PPC64 is out

5

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 17, 2026, 12:23:42 am »

Has the JIT made it into trunk for ppc64le yet? I am starting to run into dumb issues with anti-bot verification, and would love to use Fedora's provided Firefox for simplicity.

No, it will take some time for the Firefox team to review the submission. For the time-being downstream distributions can adopt the patches as they like. From what I heard from Dan Horak (the maintainer of Fedora Firefox package) is that he will introduce JIT support when version 153 is out. It has not happened yet so I believe he might be occupied with other higher priority works.

Btw, what site did you run into anti-bot verification?

6

Operating Systems and Porting / [NEWS] Linux 7.2

« on: August 17, 2026, 12:20:24 am »

So what's new?

* initial HDMI 2.1 FRL support to the AMDGPU driver -- so far no regression found yet, amdgpu works as expected
* support for devres-based management of ACPI notify handlers
* initial CRI platform support for the Intel Xe driver
* Rust support for the IBM System/390 (S/390) architecture
* Fair(er) GPU scheduler
* improves the new NTFS filesystem introduced in Linux kernel 7.1
and many more changes

Not much changes related to ppc64

7

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 11, 2026, 10:14:29 pm »

https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox-ppc64/releases/tag/FIREFOX_153_0_4_RELEASE_PPC64 has also added support for PowerPC970 (G4/G5). I have tested it on Debian Linux running on my POWER9 box and had 2 folks in the ArchPOWER side to help with the verification with their G5 however I am not 100% certain that it would perfectly on native hardware (PowerMac G4)

8

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 03, 2026, 11:48:28 pm »

Thanks tle. FF BE it is huge milestone.

So next milestone will be GLES-3.0 BE  mesa driver support, otherwise firefox webrender hard accel do not work. Atm only gles2.0 extensions is supported on BE.

That's way out of scope. Even if I want to do it, I have zero clue about mesa codebases. My initial goal was to get SpiderMonkey up and running on BE. Fortunately the full Firefox can be built and ran successfully (despite of lacking optimisations in many components). I guess that is enough as foundation for the community to improve upon.

9

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: August 03, 2026, 07:07:45 pm »

So tle firefox port already support big endian?
This Firefox-v153 patches work on ESR140.12?

thanks of adavance.

Yes BE is now fully supported.

The ESR 153 patches will NOT work on ESR 140.

10

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: July 24, 2026, 08:16:56 am »

@tle

I'll try to add your patches from yesterday for version 153 to my Void Linux templates as soon as possible and run some comparison tests with version 152.

I'd like to point out that Firefox is actually slower than Chromium (on x86_64 and aarch64) for the same KrakenJS tests.

11

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Follow-up: Void Linux on ppc64le - Firefox Native Build vs Fedora 42

« on: July 22, 2026, 02:58:21 am »

Your finding is spot on. Clang+LTO produces the smallest size binary and the performance is better.

12

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: July 22, 2026, 02:23:51 am »

Chiming in to say I've been testing a Fedora build of v152 that has not hiccuped once and finally feels like a full-featured browser. It's slower than Chromium on the same hardware - the Kraken JS test indicated around 1200ms on Chromium, and a skosh over 2100ms on Firefox - but for everyday usage I'm quite happy. Thanks for this!

The Firefox 153 JIT SpiderMonkey is actually 18% faster than Chromium + V8. The slowness derives from the browser side, likely DOM rendering which is out of scope of this work btw.

13

Operating Systems and Porting / Re: Follow-up: Void Linux on ppc64le - Firefox Native Build vs Fedora 42

« on: July 20, 2026, 07:59:02 pm »

Good finding. Let me try to dig in a bit and see if I could re-produce similar results on Fedora 44

14

Applications and Porting / Re: [DEV] JIT support for Firefox

« on: July 20, 2026, 07:55:51 pm »

tle, are you already using Fable, or which model do you use?

I do use a little bit of Fable before it was taken down by the US government. These days I use a bit of Opus for mundane tasks like rebasing or monitoring full test suites run.

15

Operating Systems and Porting / [HELP] Install grub boot loader for Chimera installation [SOLVED]

« on: June 23, 2026, 07:26:00 pm »

Good morning everyone

I would like to ask if anyone has managed to install grub boot-loader successfully for their Chimera installation. This is how I did it but upon restarting the boot-loader failed to load correct firmware:

Code: [Select]

# NOTES: This installation is done in libvirt VM (so no petitboot obviously)

# Download the ISO then boot it up under VM

$ cfdisk /dev/vda
choose `gpt`

select Free space -> choose [New] -> 16MB
select /dev/vda1 -> [Type] -> PowerPC PReP boot

select Free space -> [New] -> 1GB
select /dev/vda2 -> [Type] -> Linux filesystem

select Free space -> [New] -> 4GB
select /dev/vda3 -> [Type] -> Linux swap

select Free space -> [New] -> 45GB
select /dev/vda4 -> [Type] -> Linux filesystem

choose [Write] --> yes

choose [quit]

$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/vda2
$ mkswap /dev/vda3
$ mkfs.ext4 /dev/vda4
$ mount /dev/vda4 /mnt
$ mount -m /dev/vda2 /mnt/boot/
$ swapon /dev/vda3
$ chimera-bootstrap /mnt
$ chimra-chroot /mnt
$ apk add grub-powerpc-ieee1275
$ mkdir -p /boot/grub/
$ grub-install --target=powerpc-ieee1275 /dev/vda1
$ update-grub

$ exit
$ umount -R /mnt
$ reboot


Great thanks in advance

EDIT: I managed to fix the issue myself, I forgot to install linux kernel, that is `apk add linux-stable` step.  I documented the full installation at https://gist.github.com/runlevel5/ca4d531c8e90c133fc31c47f823c073d