Re: Privilege Levels Below User

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.

John