Re: Modern browsers on OpenBSD for PowerPC?

Greetings,

On Feb 19, 2024 at 06:41 +0800, Roberto Arturo Gonzalez Godinez <robglezDev=
@proton.me>, wrote:
> Prior upgrading to OpenBSD 7.4 on my powerbook G4 I did see that there
> where a couple of webkit based browsers ports such as vimb.
>
> It seems that vimb no longer available, but I did not look to find the
> reason as of why it was possibly removed. (It is still present on 7.3)

OpenBSD has a pretty non-transparent system here, but I guess the port can =
be restored trivially, locally first, and then in the master.

I am not really keen on building a browser on G4 though, and so far I could=
 not get OpenBSD working on G5 (fragile installation, kernel panic, freezes=
). If it works, I will try.

Anyone knows why Chromium does not build? V8 in the master has a broken Pow=
erPC code, but I have the build fixed on macOS ppc (notice, it builds, but =
does not yet work: I suspect ABI should be fixed, and it is a non-trivial t=
ask; however, for ELF systems this may not be a problem).

If OpenBSD supported ppc64, that would solve the issue with V8 (almost, not=
 completely, since VSX code should be made conditional, upstream totally me=
ssed that up). But AFAIU, ppc64 is broken with OpenBSD officially (on a sid=
e note, it is broken de facto with FreeBSD too, despite being supported on =
paper).
> I was poking around with the idea of running a recent Firefox version on
> AIX and I was told that apparently there are recent versions of Firefox
> for Solaris. So, with a bunch of work, running Firefox on BE and on
> other UNIX's is possible.

Firefox needs Rust, unfortunately, and that is likely to be broken, until m=
rustc is able to bootstrap modern-enough Rust and we fix it for PowerPC, an=
d gcc backend is implemented.
Or until gccrs is usable in real-life applications (it builds and even pass=
es the test suites on ppc, last time I tried).
> =C2=A0guess that it's lack of interest, resources and possibly hardware to
> port a recent version of Firefox on macppc OpenBSD. Building Firefox
> on an older PowerPC box sure will be long.

TFF or Palemoon take about 3 hrs on the G5 Quad, I think. Palemoon does not=
 work yet, but it builds.
There are hopes we get it running:=C2=A0https://github.com/dbsoft/White-Sta=
r/issues/2
> As Florian pointed out, Netsurf does work well for simple websites.
AFAIK, this is not a meaningful option. I meant something which supports ht=
ml5 and modern web.
> I guess that you could ask Landry for more information on the status
> of Firefox on PowerPC (He is the maintainer of Firefox).
>
> I would of liked to help, but I no longer have the time to contribute.
> Are you planning to help building Firefox for OpenBSD macpp?
Well, if the question is just running the build, sure. It is not something =
I can fix on my own, perhaps, though. We struggle even with MacOS for quite=
 some time, and that stuff is at least familiar.

Provided Palemoon is made to work on macOS ppc, I could try porting the bui=
ld to OpenBSD.
> If so, from your MacPorts maintenance, I can imagine that you have the
> required hardware. If you don't, in the following weeks, I could setup a
> G4 tower and give you ssh access to it so you could leave Firefox
> building on it.
>
> And if there's enough interest, I can check if I could setup an OpenBSD
> macppc vm on a Linux PPC64 LE host and benefit from kvm as it's quite a
> powerful machine, but I don't know if OpenBSD macppc runs under kvm. I'd
> have to check that out.
>
> Let me know!
>
> On Sunday, February 18th, 2024 at 08:07, Florian M=C3=A4rkl <openbsd@flor=
ianmaerkl.de> wrote:
>
> > Hi Sergey,
> >
> > last time I tried, netsurf from ports worked fairly well.
> > It does not support all the latest web standards, but can
> > display simple websites.
> >
> > By the way, a huge thanks for your work on MacPorts maintenance for
> > ppc. I am an avid user of both Mac OS X with MacPorts and OpenBSD on
> > multiple G5 machines and find it amazing to see how much is still
> > possible with them!
> >
> > Cheers
> > Florian
> >
> > > Am 17.02.2024 um 22:11 schrieb Sergey Fedorov [email protected]:
> > >
> > > Greetings,
> > >
> > > Could someone say what is the current state of modern web browsers for
> > > PowerPC?
> > > Is anything working? I tried to install via pkg_add and nothing was
> > > available, sadly. (Unless I missed something.)
> > >
> > > By the way, I assume the following code is wrong, and would prevent
> > > qutebrowser from building:
> > > https://github.com/openbsd/ports/blob/0bf6e78f8ed8dfcc1d253d505b23eee=
d7c28606c/www/qutebrowser/Makefile#L43-L49
> > > It is very likely that something broken both on ppc64 and i386 cannot=
 work
> > > fine on ppc, that too Rust-related. I believe, powerpc should be adde=
d to
> > > the exclusion list for Rust-using dependency.