On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 10:57 AM, Bernhard R. Link <[email protected]> wrote:
> * Howard Eisenberger <[email protected]> [131004 20:20]: > > (2) "Bus error" with iceweasel and iceape. I believe it's been > > like this for a couple of years now. > > Those are big problems and getting them bug free can be a big task, > though sparc is really good to catch the bugs here. A valid C program > cannot cause a bus error on sparc and an invalid C program is likely > to fail also on other architectures whenever the compiler adds new > optimisations. So fixing those bugs will benefit everyone. > That's the theory. In reality, maintainers of large and complex software projects (like mozilla/firefox) do not really care about fringe architectures, and I don't see why this situation would improve with time. A pragmatic (but less conceptually-correct) approach would be to convince sparc kernel maintainers to introduce unaligned memory access handling for userspace programs. That would incur a penalty every time an unaligned access happens, but, in my opinion, it's better to have a slow-but-working binary than the one which crashes all the time. The code for handling unaligned memory accesses for kernel code already exists, so I don't think it would be too big of a challenge for someone who knows their way around kernel code. On a related note, I posted a patch to http://bugs.debian.org/674908 (was RC, but eventually got tagged wheezy-ignore) which allowed me to browse some javascript-heavy sites. > > Bernhard R. Link > > > -- > To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] > with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact > [email protected] > Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected] > > -- Jurij Smakov | [email protected] | Key IDs: 43C30A7D/C99E03CC
