Firefox, ipc and powerpc

As you already know, mozilla had cut'n'paste the entire ipc (InterProcess Communication) part of Chromium.
Ipc are used to make sandbox for plugins and for tabs: it is an important feature that should be available to all firefox users.

Sadly, Chromium developers focus on x86 and arm, so doesn't care if their code are portable. They doesn't care if their core is endianness-independent too: bad things, 'cause we don't know the future, and if future big endian chips will dominate the world.

Mozilla has checked the code before cut & paste? Absolutely not!

So, the only thing left to powerpc users is to disable the entire ipc part with --disable-ipc.

I've spent this afternoon to play into their source code, and I have made a patch which adds atomic operation support in their code. You could see the patch here [1].

If you have some time (I had exams :P) there is a nice things you could do: check data_pack.cc, and make it endianness-independent. Maybe there are only some swap todo.


[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=579757