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[bug#61009] Building Icecat and jemalloc on aarch64-linux

Message ID 86ilgyuyc1.fsf@burningswell.com
State New
Headers show
Series [bug#61009] Building Icecat and jemalloc on aarch64-linux | expand

Commit Message

Roman Scherer Jan. 22, 2023, 8:06 p.m. UTC 
Hi Guix,

I'm trying to build Icecat on an aarch64-linux based Guix system. I got it
working with the patches attached to this mail. I would like to include this
into Guix but I am not sure about the following issues:

1. jemalloc

I'm using the kernel configuration from the Asahi Linux project which uses 16K
as the kernel page size. Because of this I get an "Unsupported system page
size" error from the jemalloc package when building Icecat.

I fixed this issue by setting the page size in the jemalloc package to 16K,
when building for an aarch64-linux system. I got this from the PKGBUILD [1] of
ARM Arch Linux.

I'm new to ARM and now I'm wondering:

- What is the default kernel page size on an aarch64-linux system?

- If there is none, is there one that is most commonly used?

- Why does ARM Arch Linux default to 16K and should we too?

- Which kernel page size is used on CI to build jemalloc and Icecat on the
  aarch64-linux builders?

- Did Icecat ever built on aarch64-linux on CI?

I also updated the version of jemalloc to 5.3.0, because I thought they also
addressed this issue for my particular aarch64-linux system [2]. This new
version sets the page size also to 16K, but only when building for an
aarch64-apple-darwin system, and not for aarch64-linux systems. So I'm not
sure only updating the version would fix the kernel page size issue here.

More than 5000 packages depend on jemalloc, so this should probably go into
the core-updates branch? The changes to jemalloc caused my world to rebuild
locally, but I ended up with a working Icecat.

2. Disable EME on aarch64-linux

I removed the --disable-eme option on aarch64-linux because the configure
script failed an error saying this option is not supported on this
architecture. Since EME stands for Encrypted Media Extensions and is a
JavaScript API for playing DRMed video content in HTML, I'm not sure if this
is ok, or what to best do here?

Could someone please review the patches and give me some advice on how to
proceed with these issues?

Thanks, Roman.

[1] https://archlinuxarm.org/packages/aarch64/jemalloc/files/PKGBUILD
[2] https://github.com/jemalloc/jemalloc/blob/dev/configure.ac#L1733
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Patch

From 71bf3cf7187de92f7974bedc2d0291a78a0754bc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: r0man <roman@burningswell.com>
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2023 19:33:13 +0100
Subject: [PATCH 3/3] gnu: icecat: Fix --disable-eme option on aarch64.

* gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm (icecat): Fix --disable-eme option on aarch64.
---
 gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm | 3 ++-
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

diff --git a/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm b/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm
index 23249791bb..95c8be5f1b 100644
--- a/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm
+++ b/gnu/packages/gnuzilla.scm
@@ -756,7 +756,8 @@  (define-public icecat
          "--disable-tests"
          "--disable-updater"
          "--disable-crashreporter"
-         "--disable-eme"
+         ;; The --disable-eme option is not available on aarch64.
+         #$(if (target-aarch64?) "" "--disable-eme")
 
          ;; Building with debugging symbols takes ~5GiB, so disable it.
          "--disable-debug"
-- 
2.38.1