GNU Iceat 115.3* pgo build fails

Pipeartist · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2023 Posts: 10

GNU Icecat-115.3.1 pgo build hangs during profiling phase. I tried Icecat-115.3.0 and it also hangs during profiling phase. The build hangs in both virtx and virtwl build environments. Icecat-102.15.0 pgo builds perfect. GNU Icecat-115.3* non-pgo builds perfect. I tried Firefox-115.3.1:esr pgo build; it builds perfect. I'm using gcc to compile but whether its clang or gcc would be irrelevant with Firefox build succeeding. If I had to guess, I'd say one of the extensions is interfering with the profiling. The 115.3.0 commit doesn't have the extensions updated whereas the 115.3.1 commit has them updated but that appears to be irrelevant. It seems like one of the extensions(prob javascript restrictor) isn't playing nice with Firefox pgo build script. Thoughts anyone?

Juippisi · Developer Joined: 30 Sep 2005 Posts: 724 Location: /home

Are you using an ebuild to build icecat, or doing it manually from source?

Few things I can suggest you try if the build hangs:
1: don't stress your computer while building,
2: use clang.

The profiling part is very I/O heavy and clang splits the profile files into hundreds of smaller files (before combining them) while gcc seems to outright collect them to a big data file. Previously there was a timeout if this task was unsuccessful, and the build would continue, but it's now been patched to just hang indefinitely if the profiling fails. It's a tradeoff for not getting perfect profiling vs. the build hanging - I haven't decided what's the correct choice here yet.

Also if your X (/ graphical) sessions has crashed recently (dmesg) the profiling phase might fail.

Pipeartist · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2023 Posts: 10

I'm using the ebuilds from src_prepare-overlay to build. I updated the makeicecat and icecat ebuilds to 115.3.1 on my machine in local repo. I tried the build with clang and it still hangs during profiling. I tried firefox-115.3.1:esr and librewolf. Both build perfect with gcc and clang. This looks to be exclusive to GNU Icecat-115*. Hopefully it's fixed in Icecat-115.4.0. I'll know soon enough.

Pipeartist · n00b Joined: 12 Feb 2023 Posts: 10

I think I have a fix for Icecat[pgo] build. I have suspected that the GNU extensions were interfering with the profiling. This had me thinking of 'private browsing mode'. Private browsing mode disables all extensions by default. I enabled 'browser.privatebrowsing.autostart' setting in the profileserver.py file.