Subject: firefox: Add ppc64le jit backend Package: firefox X-Debbugs-Cc: [email protected] Version: 151.0.4 Severity: wishlist
Dear Maintainer, I am writing to share a patch series that adds a PPC64LE JIT backend to SpiderMonkey, and to ask whether Debian's firefox package could carry it as a downstream patch while the work works its way through Mozilla's upstream review process. The patch set adds a native PPC64LE (little-endian) JIT backend for SpiderMonkey, bringing JIT-compiled JavaScript and WebAssembly to IBM POWER8/9/10 hardware. Without it, SpiderMonkey falls back to the slow interpreter on that architecture, making Firefox largely unusable for everyday web browsing. The patch could be downloaded from my firefox fork at https://github.com/runlevel5/firefox/releases/tag/FIREFOX_151_0_4_RELEASE_PPC64 . The work is built upon the foundation laid Cameron Kaiser and Justin Hibbits, who produced an initial PPC64 port for an older Firefox version (available at https://github.com/chmeeedalf/gecko-dev). It has been tested by PPC community for months, as of version 151, the SpiderMonkey is considered feature parity to other backends like ARM64. Realistically the upstreaming process would take months to over a year for a new tier-3 architecture. In the meantime, ppc64le users of Debian are stuck with an interpreter-only Firefox or having to maintain their own Debian package version. Would the Debian maintainer be willing to carry these patches as a downstream delta — similar to how the chromium package have historically carried ppc64le architecture-specific patches ahead of upstream acceptance? I am committed to rebasing and updating the patches for each new release and to being responsive to any issues that arise on Debian's ppc64el builds. Thank you for your time and for maintaining Firefox for Debian. I look forward to hearing your thoughts. Best regards, -- System Information: Debian Release: 13.5 APT prefers stable-updates APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable-security'), (500, 'stable') Architecture: ppc64el (ppc64le) Kernel: Linux 7.0.11-200.fc44.ppc64le (SMP w/32 CPU threads; PREEMPT) Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE not set Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash Init: unable to detect
