Tag: Web

GitHub and IPv6, three years later

Three years ago, I wrote Going IPv6 native without IPv4, which noted all the services I couldn’t access over IPv6. After all this time, there is some good news, and bad news.

First, the good news: BitBucket, Savannah, and Launchpad all support IPv6 now!

Now, the bad news: GitHub still does not. This has actually prevented me from setting up a trial run of acme.sh on a server. The server I was going to test LE on is only connected to the public Internet via IPv6. Yes, I was actually trying to see if Let’s Encrypt has gotten any better, and I was prevented from doing it because GitHub does not support IPv6.

Authors of ACME clients, especially ones that are only available via GitHub: find a mirror that supports IPv6! At this point, now I’m going to have to set up acme.sh on my workstation, and then scp the certificates over to the server every 60 days. Thanks GitHub.

YouTube. 1080p. Big-endian PowerPC + Firefox.

H.264:

[Nightmare Moon grinning about the same way I was when I saw this]
The Moon Rises, playing in 1080p on big-endian Firefox with correct colours.

VP8/VP9:

[ Tractors ]
VP8 and VP9 WebM demos, playing in big-endian Firefox

I additionally shot a short 4 second video clip of the Talos in action.

I’ve filed a bug with Mozilla to upstream this work. If you do have a bmo account, consider Voting for this issue. (Don’t spam the bug tracker with +1 comments; it won’t help.)

Please also consider supporting my progress on Patreon, PayPal, or Ko-fi. I hope you’re as excited about this as I am!

Status update for Firefox on PowerPC / big endian

(This post is probably not interesting to non-technical observers.  Rest assured, I’m still working quite hard on porting Firefox to PowerPC when I have the chance.)

I’ve just pulled the latest Firefox code (from mozilla-central) and have fully rebuilt Firefox with the latest code.

First, the good news: JS-API tests are still 100% passing.  XPC Shell tests are up!  10 more tests pass now, and it took a full 17 minutes less time to run the test suite.  This is huge; it shows that if we (the POWER, SPARC, System/390, etc communities) work together with Mozilla to truly fix Firefox on big endian, there should be no issues keeping it working.

And now, some of the worse news.  Skia m71 has landed on the tree, which is meant to bring feature-parity with Chrome 71.  This was a major loss for us.  Skia does not compile at all on any architecture other than x86 and ARM.  Once that bug was patched around, it also does not compile correctly on big endian systems; thankfully, Marcus from the Raptor Talos community already had some patches written for this during their Chromium port sprint.  And now, unfortunately, comes the truly bad news: even after fixing all the build errors, it is not possible to start Firefox with Skia m71.  This seems to be related to the text layer code, which was not always working correctly anyway.  Before, this would just cause some graphical glitches; now it is a completely fatal error.

This will require more digging than I presently have the time to consider, unfortunately.  I probably won’t get back to Mozilla porting until early next week.  This will give me the time I need to focus on writing Parcel, Adélie’s next-generation package database tool and Web site.

If you like what you see and want to ensure that Firefox is ported to POWER, in addition to all of the other important work that we do improving the Linux ecosystem, please consider supporting the Adélie Linux project on Patreon, or chipping in with cryptocurrency.  Your support is what keeps efforts like this going.  Thank you!

Big Endian Firefox: Now with more compositing

I’m currently in the process of trying to bring up the PowerPC platform as a fully supported architecture in Firefox.  I’ve already implemented better support for XPCOM / JS interfacing, and fixed a crash in the JavaScript interpreter. My next challenge is fixing graphical issues, which is proving to be more of a challenge than I initially anticipated.

However, I have broken some new ground.  Before, the compositing engine had wildly inaccurate colouring caused by errant “swizzle methods” (which are functions that take images of one colour type and change them to another – or, “swizzle” them).  This resulted in Firefox 64 (Nightly) looking like this on my workstation:

Firefox, with blue blocks and weird colours everywhere
Firefox, with a broken compositor

I’ve just managed to fix these methods and lo and behold, Firefox 64 (Nightly) looks like this now:

Screenshot_20181019_205618
Firefox, with working compositor

Obviously, there are still some minor nits to work out.  (Namely that my avatar in the top right corner has a blue tint to it!)  I believe the last issues are going to be in the Cairo code, which seems to get very confused by Skia’s byte ordering.  I already have a lead on how to potentially fix this issue.  The good news is that there are no longer any (non-debug) crashers, unless you attempt to view H.264 video.  This is because video playback via FFmpeg crashes due to another byte ordering issue.

All in all, I’m very satisfied with what I was able to knock out in just a few hours on a Friday night.  Thanks go to the #gfx chat room on Mozilla IRC for their guidance in what to look at.