Firefox WebAssembly (WASM) on ppc64le? Jitsi Meet, Zoom, etc not working

[pocock]

Does anybody know about support for Firefox WebAssembly (WASM) on ppc64le?

Some web sites like Zoom don't work without it.

Since March, it looks like Jitsi Meet may require WebAssembly too

Is WASM available in any recent version of Firefox?  Can it be enabled if I rebuild Firefox from source?

[ClassicHasClass]

There is no Wasm support currently. It's being worked on and we'd love contributors (right now it's primarily me with some help from chmeee): https://github.com/chmeeedalf/gecko-dev/commits/master

[bobpaul]

What's the status on this these days?

I found an open Mozilla issue for WASM. Is that just for the WASM portion (and there's other bugs tracking other portions), or is that tracking the entire JIT+WASM effort?

It looks like kth includes your patch for Firefox-esr v128 in his archlinux package. And running that build of firefox in an archpower chroot scores quite a bit higher than fedora's firefox v133 on BrowserBench (but also higher than the Firefox v130 from Archpower; it's not clear to me if the JIT patches are included there..)

[ClassicHasClass]

It was working for awhile in internal test builds but changes to Firefox have caused it to crash on Wasm startup, deep within the code. I'm continuing to struggle with this and I'm trying to work on a better debugging setup as time permits.

A similar thing happens with Ion (second-stage) compilation, so they are probably related. Right now the JIT works but is limited to Baseline (first-stage) JS compilation and irregexp.

I haven't updated the patches for anything later than 128ESR yet but it's possible it may apply directly to more recent versions.

[Borley]

Well that explains why certain interactive pages have been erroring "WebAssembly not defined" when checking the developer console.

I just chalked it up to my user.js template disabling WASM.

[bobpaul]

Right now the JIT works but is limited to Baseline (first-stage) JS compilation and irregexp.

I haven't updated the patches for anything later than 128ESR yet but it's possible it may apply directly to more recent versions.

Ah, sweet! With the patches I can go into about:config and enable wasm and baseline_jit and now my password manager works! That's honestly a big quality of life increase, lol.

[ClassicHasClass]

Well that explains why certain interactive pages have been erroring "WebAssembly not defined" when checking the developer console.

I just chalked it up to my user.js template disabling WASM.

Although it may be possible to use some sort of Wasm interpreter or polyfill, obviously the best solution is to get the actual JIT working, of course. Otherwise, yes, there is no Wasm if there is no JIT.

[Borley]

WebAssembly is increasingly being used by online check-outs. This is starting to become a usability issue for me, as I find myself falling back to spare x86 machines to do things like making online purchases.

[ClassicHasClass]

Which checkouts did you run into this on?

Unfortunately, since I'm pretty much a permanent remote worker for the foreseeable future, I'm only on my desktop a few days a month now, so I've been concentrating on what I can do at distance and maintaining a browser isn't one of those things. I will be keeping the patches up for the next ESR but Wasm still doesn't work and it really needs someone else's eyes on it to see what I can't. I'm considering starting from scratch but again it's a time issue.

Chromium's Wasm support does seem OK now, if you can stomach that for the sites you need to use it on.