Re: Privilege Levels Below User

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.