On 2/16/22 00:08, Timothy Pearson wrote:
There is a long and complex history here, much of it out of the public eye, but
the long and short of it is that Google simply doesn't want to put effort into
supporting an architecture it doesn't use / ship hardware products (Chromebook
/ Pixel) for. Personally I have suspicions that it goes deeper, into the owner
control aspects of the POWER systems currently shipping (e.g. Widevine will
never work by design, and it will be harder to track users in the future
without various vendor components (Intel ME/AMD PSP/ARM Trustzone) subverting
the OS, but the latter is still pure speculation on my part.
At the end of the day it's likely a pure business decision from Google -- one
less architecture to support means fewer employees working on the Chromium
project overall and lower costs / faster code churn.
Here are some of the public bugs and Google's responses:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=925171
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1029662
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1076455
Note I am willing to try to re-enage with upstream and see if there has been an
opportunity for merge created with e.g. Gentoo and Void shipping Chromium with
these patches enabled. If Debian (and by extension Ubuntu?) were to also add
the patches, that would help with the overall business case in terms of the
real-world need to have the patches accepted by upstream.
Thanks for the links, that's helpful. From issue #1076455, upstream
seems to be saying they're not interested in providing pre-built
binaries for architectures they don't support. That makes sense, and I
can understand their reasons for it. As an aside, I don't see any
gn-specific patches in your patch set, but if you do have any changes
needed for gn - we're building using debian's gn package (
https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/generate-ninja ), so you'd want to file a
bug and get them applied there. I see that we're already auto-building
ppc64el binaries of gn, but just FYI.
More importantly for your needs, there's this comment:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=925171#c1 , which
sounds like they'd allow patches to support the platform, even if
they're not building binaries for that platform. If upstream is actually
open to accepting individual patches to fix/enable ppc64(le? el?)
support , and you can break these patches up and submit them upstream,
then that would allow distributions to build without having to carry an
invasive patch set. The largest hassle for distributions isn't the large
patch that adds new headers full of libvpx configs (to pick a random
example), it's the 10-line patch that touches BUILD.gn (or
libaom/BUILD.gn, etc); a file that changes frequently and that we end up
having to patch for other reasons as well. So I'd suggest starting with
those kinds of patches upstream, and that should help with every
distribution trying to build chromium for your platform.
I'll likely forget, so please do remind in the chromium-100 timeframe to
look further into supporting this.
