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From: Robert Swindells <rjs@fdy2.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Privilege Levels Below User
Date: Sun, 16 Jun 2024 16:58:58 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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On Sat, 15 Jun 2024 12:16 +0100 (BST), John Dallman wrote:

> In article <v4ifbt$32kuq$8@dont-email.me>, ldo@nz.invalid (Lawrence
> D'Oliveiro) wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 22:10:23 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:
>> > It's not quite that simple - if you try to build a modern web brower
>> > for POWER on Linux, for example, you're in for quite an adventure.
>> 
>> Endianness assumptions? I think essentially all of the basic toolchain
>> is already available, so what's left would be mostly bugs in the app
>> code itself. For which I'm sure they would accept patches.
> 
> There are a _lot_ of libraries and other components that go into a
> modern web browser, many of which will never have been built on POWER.
> The JITer for the Javascript engine, and the Web Assembly translator
> seem to be among them, and they need to make use of the native
> instruction set. That's not a bug fix, that's a significant
> implementation task.
> 
> As modern web browser does a _lot_ more than interpret HTML and display
> bitmaps, and most of the code for the extra functionality is in the
> browser. They're more like multimedia operating systems than document
> viewers.

Even the code that interprets HTML can be difficult to port to a less 
common architecture, or even keep it working on that architecture.

In Firefox, a lot of it is written in Rust which is still changing 
rapidly.