Severity: normal
Control: retitle 1010407 chromium: does not support older CPUs without
SSE3 instructions
Tags: wontfix
Thanks for the report! It looks like chromium officially dropped older
CPU support:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chrome-stops-working-on-old-processors
There's not much I can do about that unfortunately, and I wouldn't
recommend using older versions of chromium due to security bugs. I
suggest firefox?
I will add a test to the chromium script to refuse to run without sse3,
though.
On 4/30/22 16:11, Gordon N. Squash wrote:
Package: chromium
Version: 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1
Severity: grave
Justification: renders package unusable
Dear Maintainer,
I am using Debian Buster i386 on an Intel Pentium 4-based machine manufactured
in mid-2003. The CPU is a Pentium 4 (Northwood) family 15, model 2, stepping
7. It supports SSE and SSE2 but not SSE3, SSSE3, AVX, x86-64, or any other
jazz that many Web browsers tend to need these days. Nevertheless, I know
that Debian versions of browsers tend to be compiled for much lower-specced
machines than even this one, and I've used slightly older versions of Chromium
(~ 85) here before, so I figured it'd work as usual.
I installed the latest version of Chromium for Buster (I intend to upgrade to
Bullseye soon). I have used Chromium on this version of Debian and this
hardware before, specifically some versions between 80 and 85. However, I
purged Chromium after using it the last time and also made a point of deleting
my Chromium profile in my home directory. Therefore, I am quite confident
that my installation is not the cause of the problem here.
Immediately after installing chromium and chromium-sandbox, I ran Chromium
from a terminal window on my desktop environment (MATE). The CPU usage spiked
for a few seconds, then fell down to zero again. Chromium never displayed a
window at all; it crashed, and printed this in the terminal:
Received signal Illegal instruction
I ran Chromium with the --debug option, and when Chromium crashed again, I
used the gdb 'disassemble' command to see what the failing instruction was:
# Env:
# LD_LIBRARY_PATH=
#
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/local/games:/usr/games
# GTK_PATH=
# CHROMIUM_FLAGS= --show-component-extension-options
--enable-gpu-rasterization --no-default-browser-check --disable-pings
--media-router=0 --enable-remote-extensions --load-extension=
/usr/bin/gdb /usr/lib/chromium/chromium -x /tmp/chromiumargs.8dFo68
GNU gdb (Debian 8.2.1-2+b3) 8.2.1
[etc]
Reading symbols from /usr/lib/chromium/chromium...(no debugging symbols
found)...done.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/lib/chromium/chromium
--show-component-extension-options --enable-gpu-rasterization
--no-default-browser-check --disable-pings --media-router=0
--enable-remote-extensions --load-extension= --single-process
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/i386-linux-gnu/libthread_db.so.1".
[New Thread 0xaf569b40 (LWP 2977)]
[Detaching after fork from child process 2978]
[Detaching after fork from child process 2979]
[New Thread 0xaebffb40 (LWP 2985)]
[New Thread 0xad673b40 (LWP 2986)]
[New Thread 0xace72b40 (LWP 2987)]
[New Thread 0xac671b40 (LWP 2988)]
[New Thread 0xabe70b40 (LWP 2989)]
[New Thread 0xab66fb40 (LWP 2990)]
Thread 6 "ThreadPoolForeg" received signal SIGILL, Illegal instruction.
[Switching to Thread 0xac671b40 (LWP 2988)]
0x05656790 in ?? ()
(gdb) disassemble 0x05656790,+16
Dump of assembler code from 0x5656790 to 0x56567a0:
=> 0x05656790: fisttpll (%esp)
0x05656793: mov (%esp),%ecx
0x05656796: mov 0x4(%esp),%edx
0x0565679a: mov %edx,0x4(%eax)
0x0565679d: mov %ecx,(%eax)
0x0565679f: jmp 0x56567ba
End of assembler dump.
(gdb)
'fisttp' is an SSE3 instruction; my CPU does not support SSE3. I would have
expected that Chromium would work on my old CPU since Firefox is specially
compiled (on Debian) to not use SSE3, and in fact if I'm not mistaken, Firefox
is compiled not to even need SSE2. (Maybe it does now, I don't know.) I
must use Chromium since some Web sites I visit (ironically, or maybe
appropriately, including intel.com) do not work correctly on Firefox or even
Webkit-based browsers like Midori; sadly I can't upgrade this old workhorse
right now.
Is there something I can do to get Chromium working? Thanks in advance.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 10.5
APT prefers oldstable
APT policy: (500, 'oldstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 5.8.6 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8),
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /usr/bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
Versions of packages chromium depends on:
ii chromium-common 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1
ii libasound2 1.1.8-1
ii libatk-bridge2.0-0 2.30.0-5
ii libatk1.0-0 2.30.0-2
ii libatomic1 8.3.0-6
ii libatspi2.0-0 2.30.0-7
ii libavcodec58 7:4.1.6-1~deb10u1
ii libavformat58 7:4.1.6-1~deb10u1
ii libavutil56 7:4.1.6-1~deb10u1
ii libc6 2.28-10
ii libcairo2 1.16.0-4
ii libcups2 2.2.10-6+deb10u3
ii libdbus-1-3 1.12.20-0+deb10u1
ii libdrm2 2.4.97-1
ii libevent-2.1-6 2.1.8-stable-4
ii libexpat1 2.2.6-2+deb10u1
ii libflac8 1.3.2-3
ii libfontconfig1 2.13.1-2
ii libfreetype6 2.9.1-3+deb10u1
ii libgbm1 18.3.6-2+deb10u1
ii libgcc1 1:8.3.0-6
ii libglib2.0-0 2.58.3-2+deb10u2
ii libgtk-3-0 3.24.5-1
ii libharfbuzz0b 2.3.1-1
ii libicu63 63.1-6+deb10u1
ii libjpeg62-turbo 1:1.5.2-2+b1
ii libjsoncpp1 1.7.4-3
ii liblcms2-2 2.9-3
ii libminizip1 1.1-8+b1
ii libnspr4 2:4.20-1
ii libnss3 2:3.42.1-1+deb10u3
ii libopenjp2-7 2.3.0-2+deb10u1
ii libopus0 1.3-1
ii libpango-1.0-0 1.42.4-8~deb10u1
ii libpng16-16 1.6.36-6
ii libpulse0 12.2-4+deb10u1
ii libre2-5 20190101+dfsg-2
ii libsnappy1v5 1.1.7-1
ii libstdc++6 8.3.0-6
ii libvpx5 1.7.0-3+deb10u1
ii libwebp6 0.6.1-2
ii libwebpdemux2 0.6.1-2
ii libwebpmux3 0.6.1-2
ii libx11-6 2:1.6.7-1
ii libxcb1 1.13.1-2
ii libxcomposite1 1:0.4.4-2
ii libxdamage1 1:1.1.4-3+b3
ii libxext6 2:1.3.3-1+b2
ii libxfixes3 1:5.0.3-1
ii libxml2 2.9.4+dfsg1-7+b3
ii libxrandr2 2:1.5.1-1
ii libxshmfence1 1.3-1
ii libxslt1.1 1.1.32-2.2~deb10u1
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.11.dfsg-1
Versions of packages chromium recommends:
ii chromium-sandbox 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1
Versions of packages chromium suggests:
pn chromium-driver <none>
pn chromium-l10n <none>
pn chromium-shell <none>
Versions of packages chromium-common depends on:
ii libc6 2.28-10
ii libgcc1 1:8.3.0-6
ii libstdc++6 8.3.0-6
ii libx11-6 2:1.6.7-1
ii libxext6 2:1.3.3-1+b2
ii x11-utils 7.7+4
ii xdg-utils 1.1.3-1+deb10u1
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.11.dfsg-1
Versions of packages chromium-common recommends:
ii chromium-sandbox 90.0.4430.212-1~deb10u1
pn fonts-liberation <none>
ii libgl1-mesa-dri 18.3.6-2+deb10u1
pn libu2f-udev <none>
ii mate-notification-daemon [notification-daemon] 1.20.2-1
ii upower 0.99.10-1
Versions of packages chromium-sandbox depends on:
ii libc6 2.28-10
-- no debconf information
