On 13/5/25 6:08 am, Ken Cunningham wrote:
It's challenging to debug firefox.
I have 3.5G of RAM, and I added an 8G swapfile, and with that firefox will run
under gdb but it takes 15-18 minutes for firefox to start. It uses a lot of
swapfile.
That's a long time. When I first tested it under gdb I found my HDD
thrashing because I had left an old swap partition active. Or actually
the installer would have picked it up. I setup an SSD that I've
dedicated to Linux installs but didn't add a swap partition too. Do you
run it from SSD?
I did add swap to my SSD but managed to install 8GB to my machine so I
could load it into pure memory. That reduces it to around 2 minutes load
time. Should time it.
Then when you start interacting with is (eg ask it to open a website) it does a
hard crash and locks up the system, with no opportunity to backtrace.
Turns out gdb logging is off by default -- I'll turn that on and see if I can
capture anything before it downs the system.
Do you have any way of attaching a terminal? My system has a serial port
so it's easy enough for me to do it the "old fashioned" way over serial
cable with a "console=ttyS0" added to my kernel command line. Don't
know if a G5 Mac USB supports but I found USB2/3 has a debug feature
that's pretty much a modern drop in replacement for a serial port link.
Just needs activating in kernel and the right USB cable. So kinda like
the old way as you need a modern USB null modem cable now. :-)
--
My regards,
Damien Stewart.
