Firefox ebuild with symbol visibility support

[nxsty]

Firefox 1.5-r9 in portage contains these patches so this overlay is now obsolete!

This is another atempt at improving performance and now firefox is the victim. One of the new features in firfox 1.5 was symbol visibility support. This makes it faster (about 5% page rendering speed) and smaller. The problem is that the way firefox sets visibility by using visibility pragmas is broken on most arches because of compiler bugs so the gentoo devs decided to disable it by default everywhere even on x86 where it's actually working.

I've been able to make firefox 1.5 build with symbol visibility by using two patches, one from the mozilla bugzilla (bug #307168) and one extracted from firefox cvs. The first patch adds a configure check for the visibility pragma bug and enables building with -fvisibility if it's found and the second fixes the exports. With these patches applied and the configure script regenerated firefox 1.5 has no problems building with symbol visibility on previously broken arches like amd64 (though I haven't been able to test on ppc and others since I don't have any). Additionaly this ebuild also fixes the location bar trying to autocomplete invalid URLs (bug #9203). I opened a bug report about it. It's apperantly illegal to enable official branding so it'll say deer park everywhere.

1. Download the overlay from http://snigel.no-ip.com/~nxsty/linux/mozilla-firefox-overlay.tar.bz2.
2. Untar it in /usr/local/portage/www-client
3. Edit make.conf and make sure you have PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage"
4. Backup your old mozilla-firefox with quickpkg
5. Unmask it if you are runnig stable
6. emerge mozilla-firefox

If you are using gcc 4.0 you should use gcc 4.0.2-r3 or later.

If you are using gcc 4.1 and it still fails you might need to apply this patch to your gcc: http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/attachment.cgi?id=10120
It's already included in the 4.0.2-r1 and later patchsets.

Changelog

2006-01-01 (2)
*Disabled official branding again.

2006-01-01
*Added a patch for mozilla bug #9203.

Enjoy!

[neenee]

as i enjoy using your xorg-x11 and glibc overlays, i'll try this one too

i'll report back with how it went.

hm.. i have a question. after reading your post, i was wondering if i
need to use certain CFLAGS to make use of the things those patches
you put in fixed.

i am thinking of: -fvisibility=hidden and -fvisibility-inlines-hidden.

i do not currently use those CFLAGS

hm. i will read the comments at mozilla bugzilla. perhaps i can figure
out the answer to my question on my own.

*update* it compiled fine, but i am not sure i did not forget to
enable regarding fvisibility.
_________________
proud to be a scout and a chronic penguin hugger
Legion of Lore - site

[Sangeki]

Just finished compiling (with gcc-4.1.0_beta20051216).

So far it seems to work great and page rendering seems to be faster but I can't test it for sure...

And I successfully enabled the official branding.
You just have to put this line under the other mozconfig_annotate lines.

[bladus]

Compiled successfully on my amd64, with official branding enabled.

It would be nice to have an rendering-benchmark to test the rendering speed.

[nxsty]

Thanks for the tip! I uploaded a new overlay with official branding enabled.

[neenee]

hm. perhaps my post was a bit too messy, so
i will ask my question in a separate post:

does this ebuild require specific CFLAGS to make
use of the visibility-related code?
_________________
proud to be a scout and a chronic penguin hugger
Legion of Lore - site

[nxsty]

[neenee]

okidoki - that is what i was hoping. thanks
_________________
proud to be a scout and a chronic penguin hugger
Legion of Lore - site

[mpalencia]

nxsty, does your gcc overlay work on this firefox ebuild?.
_________________
Lucky Livecd 32 and 64 bit versions (reiser4 suppport)
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-p-2986139.html#2986139

There are 2 things infinite: the universe and human stupidity, but I am not sure about the first one. (Einstein)

[Cinder6]

Well, been using the patched glibc since it was originally posted to the Gentoo AMD64 mailing list...I just gotta try this Fetching...
_________________
Knowledge is power.
Power corrupts.
Study hard.
Be evil.

Ugly Overload

[Cinder6]

Okay, I compiled it.

Page rendering *does* seem faster.
_________________
Knowledge is power.
Power corrupts.
Study hard.
Be evil.

Ugly Overload

[gringo]

awesome nxsty, thanks for your efforts !
Will try asap and report back

cheers

[feld]

wow, NICE!


Dude you're full of it. This *HAS* to be more than 5% performance increase!!!

This is GREAT!



-Feld
_________________
< bmg505> I think the first line in reiserfsck is

if (random(65535)< 65500) { hose(partition); for (i=0;i<100000000;i++) print_crap(); }

[martin.k]

Yeah! Works much faster than std firefox ebuild
Thanx!
_________________
linux-2.6.17 +ck +R4 +lockless +genetic-as +... więcej nie pamiętam
LRU #299256

[playfool]

[gringo]

good job ! Have no numbers but it really looks snappier !
another happy user here -> running nice on my opterons box and on my powerbook too

cheers

[nxsty]

[nxsty]

I added a patch for mozilla bug #9203. It's unrelated to this but is a very annoying bug. I also opened a bug in the gentoo bugzilla to get these patches included in portage.

[Anarchy]

[nxsty]

[Anarchy]

[nxsty]

[Sangeki]

[Anarchy]

If your wondering what changes have been made up to this point that are not in the tree grab my overlay http://dev.gentoo.org/~anarchy/overlay/mozilla-overlay.tar.gz Many issues have been addressed up to this point. If you could please keep this on the sticky tho everything related to firefox/thunderbird-1.5 as that is thread I watch to see what you the user are wanting to see become of portage ebuilds.

[StringCheesian]

Thank you, nxsty, for the overlay and for bringing these patches to a Gentoo developer's attention. You rock! Even if you're not credited for Anarchy's overlay, know that you are appreciated.