OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Programming

AVX enabled Firefox

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Dariusz Piatkowski:
Hi Dave!


--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on February 22, 2021, 07:04:07 pm ---Hi Dariusz, this should be it, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dV1S9yYyyV6LAfOTqNcCDlu42kDzkpgG/view?usp=drivesdk
Let me know it it works.

--- End quote ---

Alright, so this report is regarding running this version of FF on OS/2 kernel (202 SMP).

Things came up fine, hit a bunch of sites, including YouTube, no issues. I will run this version for an extended period of time to see how it holds up to normal "wear'n'tear".

In the meantime, tying this back to the AVX enabled ffmpeg conversation: does this mean that the newly enabled AVX capability in FF really does NOT come into play unless I'm running it on OS/4 kernel?

Thanks for the effort and time you always put into these things Dave!

Dave Yeo:
This Firefox is not AVX enabled. See my first message, for some reason targeting sandybridge resulted in some weird errors, so out of curiosity I targeted your CPU to see if it would compile and it did, so once built, why not share.
I was also curious what would happen if I tried to run the AVX enabled Firefox here on my I5 with the OS/2 kernel. I think it would have caused the system to become funky as I doubt that it would have checked for the OS having AVX capabilities, unlike programs that are written to run on all CPU's.

Dave Yeo:
I should also mention that this build of Firefox won't run on too many processors, even newer AMD CPU's will likely fail due to it possibly using some 3DNOW code which I believe supprt for was removed at some point.

Dariusz Piatkowski:
Dave,


--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on February 22, 2021, 08:23:47 pm ---This Firefox is not AVX enabled. See my first message, for some reason targeting sandybridge resulted in some weird errors, so out of curiosity I targeted your CPU to see if it would compile and it did, so once built, why not share.
--- End quote ---

Ahh...OK, sorry I focused on the "...OTOH, building a Phenom II (-march=amdfam10) succeeds...". Either way, I am good with this build because I think this does a bit of a catch-up as far as some security patches you had applied to the non-AMD builds...so I'm glad to have that deployed!


--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on February 22, 2021, 08:23:47 pm ---...I was also curious what would happen if I tried to run the AVX enabled Firefox here on my I5 with the OS/2 kernel. I think it would have caused the system to become funky as I doubt that it would have checked for the OS having AVX capabilities, unlike programs that are written to run on all CPU's.

--- End quote ---

For what it's worth there is a AVX Instruction set recognition bug (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1110570) out there, I just started to read through it as it came up as I was doing a bit of a deeper-dive into "why is AVX good for me??? LOL".

In that bug they specifically point out the following:

1) AVX instructions should be emitted only if XSAVE is enabled by the OS
2) check the extended control register for OS support

The bug itself is from 6 years ago...

Dave Yeo:
That is about the JS JIT compiler not respecting whether the OS supports AVX instructions. Doesn't seem to apply to us as there hasn't been any reports of crashes that could be tied to it.
It does bring up the point that on an OS4 kernel, the JIT compiler likely produces AVX instructions.

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