Re: Firefox52 broken on NetBSD9.3 / pkgsrc-2022Q4

[David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost>]

On Tue, 21 Mar 2023 at 15:42, Connor McLaughlan <cont6pro3%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 11:13 PM David Brownlee <abs%absd.org@localhost> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, 18 Mar 2023 at 22:09, Connor McLaughlan <cont6pro3%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> > >
> > > I found the problem!
> > >
> > > It seems a certain thread of firefox52 is crashing without notice
> > > leading to the error and I finally found the cause after replacing
> > > almost the whole dependency tree it occurred to me that neither the
> > > dependencies nor the firefox pkgversion might be the cause.
> > > Searching through the pkgsrc-2021Q4 release notes i found that
> > > hardening was elevated and more hardening was enabled exactly in this
> > > release where the problems seems to have started.
> > >
> > > Release notes tell:
> > > " - PKGSRC_USE_MKPIE was enabled on some architectures.  Packages that
> > >    provide static libraries to other packages should be rebuilt with
> > >    MKPIE enabled.  Some packages may experience runtime errors on
> > >    platforms like i386 - usually this is due to unsafe assembly code,
> > >    which should be disabled when MKPIE is enabled.
> > >  - PKGSRC_USE_SSP was bumped from "yes" to "strong".  This is not
> > >    expected to have a noticable effect."
> > >
> > > So i searched for how to disable those when experiencing runtime
> > > errors and found this webpage:
> > > https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/hardening.html#hardening.caveats.pie
> > >
> > > I added all workarounds as told to mozilla-common.mk before .include
> > > "../../mk/bsd.prefs.mk":
> > > MKPIE_SUPPORTED= no
> > > FORTIFY_SUPPORTED= no
> > > RELRO_SUPPORTED= no
> > > SSP_SUPPORTED= no
> > >
> > > And after recompiling firefox52 it is working again!
> > > I possibly overshot here..possibly only SSP and/or MKPIE need to be disabled.
> > >
> > > So how to proceed from here? It seems not only firefox52 is affected
> > > on sparc64, but also thunderbird52 and possibly other packages...
> >
> > Excellent catch. We can definitely disable the appropriate options on
> > sparc64 (with a nice comment in the Makefiles for the future curious
> > :)
> >
> > Would you be willing to run another couple of tests to find exactly
> > which need to be disabled?
> >
> > Thanks!
> >
> > David
>
> Hello David,
>
> firefox52 and thunderbird52 need to be compiled with "SSP_SUPPORTED= no" to run.

Excellent - both pkgsrc entries updated (and just in time for a new
pkgsrc release :)

> arcticfox gives a bus error, even when compiled with all hardening disabled;
> but this is a new package since 2022Q4 and has not been run
> successfully for me on sparc64 yet.

You might want to reach out to the arcticfox developer (and/or try
compiling the latest source from
https://github.com/rmottola/Arctic-Fox - it still looks to be under
active development :)

> I am currently testing to compile and run seamonkey-2.53.13 of 2022Q4
> but i expect this to fail due to other issues on sparc64; the last
> known good version for me was seamonkey-2.49.5.

We can add back a "last known working" seamonkey if its found to be useful

> I will report back if i can get anything to run additionally on
> sparc64 that currently fails to.

Sounds good!

Thanks

David