PowerPC

Firefox on PowerPC

This is the landing page for the Firefox on PowerPC workforce.

If you want to help, need help, or have questions regarding the PowerPC architecture, please join us on the IRC channel #ppc64 on Mozilla IRC network.

Team

Gustavo Luiz Duarte
Marty Rosenberg
Terrence Cole
Cameron Kaiser

Status

We have a buildbot running on ppc64 continuously building mozilla-central: http://mozillaproject.osuosl.org:8010/waterfall
We plan to add automated tests to the buildbot soon. We might also consider building for ppc32.

Goals

Our initial goal is to assure that regressions are quickly identified and to provide help to developers who are not used to the architecture or don't have access to PowerPC hardware to test/debug their code.
Another goal that we might consider is porting existing features that are currently disabled for PowerPC. This is a more aggressive goal and so we will have to be extra careful to make sure we don't disrupt tier-1 development.

Before anyone jumps to conclusions, let me clarify that we understand that PowerPC is a tier-3 platform and there is no plan from this team to change that any time soon. If that ever happens, it will happen naturally as the result of our success maintaining the platform.

We want to spread the word to developers who want their code running properly on the PowerPC architecture. If you need help testing, debugging, verifying patches, or need access to PowerPC hardware, just let us know on #ppc64 or email Gustavo directly and we can arrange whatever you need.

We need help!

If you want to help, here are some areas that need some love:

• JS JITs: JavaScript JIT compilers are currently disabled on PowerPC. Needs porting.
• Skia: currently disabled on PowerPC.
• Bug fixing: there are many open bugs against several Mozilla components (mainly Core) on PowerPC.
• There are certainly other components that are disabled for PowerPC that need to be ported. I will add them here as I stumble upon them.