Thierry, Sorry for the delayed reply.
On Wed, Jun 6, 2018 at 8:06 AM, Thierry <> wrote: > Hi, > > (your e-mail found in a build guide for Android firefox -- feel free to > forward to appropriate list or wiki) > I'm replying to dev-builds in case others are interested in your research, and I've tried to keep your full name and email out of the reply in case you don't want them shared. > For your information, the ARM64 architecture becoming competitive in > low-cost embedded computers (e.g. Hardkernel Odroid C2 with 2GB RAM builds > fiferox in circa 11 hours), it may be attractive to do an Android firefox > build using a native compiler. > > Here is my experience with building kernel and packages for this ARM64 > target. I followed the classical cross-compiling method for the kernel (I > got the version info and .config from the Odroid C2 / Amlogic SOC support > community), but I realized that cross-compilation for packages would be > difficult when I noticed that the ldconfig utility does not support > cross-development. So I decided that native build would be the routine. > > My preferred Linux source-based distribution is Crux (https://crux.nu, > https://crux-arm.nu) which provides a simple but effective package > management scheme where the firefox prerequisites were readily downloaded, > build, and installed. I did the amateur mistake to first attempt the > firefox build without an 8GB swap partition, which I finally provided > through NFS (a known trick). > > The basic X11 software and a primitive windows manager had been almost > trivially build and installed. The browser is the monster package in this > project, and build from source is not a top priority. > > Here are a few ideas: > > (1) As written above, an ARM64 Linux might be a build system for Android > Firefox. > > (2) Maybe the following build documentation quote should be fixed: > "Detailed Requirements > General considerations > [...] > A 64-bit x86 CPU and a 64-bit OS." > (It needs not be an X86 CPU any more). > Ref: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g > uide/Build_Instructions/Simple_Firefox_build/Linux_and_ > MacOS_build_preparation If this is really true, please update the MDN page you link, perhaps with a footnote saying that it is possible to build on ARM64 devices. (3) Maybe an ARM64 Linux binary firefox package could be offered. It may > actually be efficient for Mozilla developer support community to do so > because amateurs like me would use the binary distribution instead of > begging for source distribution support when they e.g. omit to provision > swap for the build. > It's unlikely that Mozilla will do this, since Linux-on-i686+ is already a small population, and Linux-on-ARM is even smaller. Somehow Debian builds Firefox for arm64 so it can't be that obscure. (And since Debian manages it, we should _definitely_ update that MDN page you link to!) For Firefox for Android, the real problem is that, IIRC, the Android toolchain distributed by Google is not available for Linux-on-ARM hosts. (I think it's Windows, macOS, and Linux-on-i686+.) If that is true there's no real hope for producing Firefox for Android builds on ARM64. If I'm wrong, please update me! (By replying to the dev-builds list.) Thanks for your efforts, Nick
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