Mozilla now publishing Firefox builds for AARCH64

[CNK]

Just mentioning that Mozilla are now publishing Nightly builds of Firefox for ARM AARCH64 and planning to introduce AARCH64 builds of all their releases later on. I haven't tried to run one myself, but this should be useful for people looking to run current versions of Firefox on 64-bit PiCore without waiting for a new firefox.tcz extension to be made. When they start doing it for normal (non-nightly) builds, it should be possible to modify the firefox_getLatest.sh script to download the AARCH64 builds in PiCore.

[CNK]

Mozilla now offer AARCH64 builds for all their Firefox release channels. The firefox_getLatest extension now supports automatically installing these in PiCore 16, and can be found in the AARCH64 PiCore repo.

[Paul_123]

nice, have you done much testing with HW accel?

[CNK]

All testing I did was on a RPi Zero 2* (the only 64-bit RPi I have), so to minimise RAM use I only tried starting Firefox remotely in an X window displayed on a PC. In that case HW graphics in FF is generally impossible anyway.

* To run the firefox_getLetest.sh and firefox_update.sh in 512MB RAM I had to remount /tmp to a directory on the SD card (a bit tricky while preserving /tmp/tcloop). Firefox itself runs out of RAM and locks up on there if you try to load big pages or most pages with Javascript. With 1GB RAM or more everything should work much better.

[mortegai]

I tested version 141.0 on PiCore 16 on a RPi4 (4 GB). It runs fine. However, there is a problem (no sound) with ALSA..
Running it from the command line shows the following messages:

Code: [Select]

./firefox
[GFX1-]: glxtest: libpci missing
[Child 8419, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: 7f203e3ff0 OpenCubeb() failed to init cubeb: file /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/dom/media/AudioStream.cpp:284
[Child 8419, MediaDecoderStateMachine #1] WARNING: Decoder=7f2045e400 [OnMediaSinkAudioError]: file /builds/worker/checkouts/gecko/dom/media/MediaDecoderStateMachine.cpp:4637

And looking in about:support, it shows:

Code: [Select]

Media
Audio Backend (remote error)
Max Channels 0
Preferred Sample Rate 44100
Roundtrip latency (standard deviation) ...
Codec Support Information
Codec Name Software Decoding Hardware Decoding Software Encoding Hardware Encoding
H264 Supported Supported Unsupported Unsupported
VP9 Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
VP8 Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
AV1 Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
HEVC Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
AAC Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
MP3 Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
Opus Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
Vorbis Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
FLAC Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
Wave Supported Unsupported Unsupported Unsupported
Output Devices
Name Group Vendor State Preferred Format Channels Rate Latency
Input Devices
Name Group Vendor State Preferred Format Channels Rate Latency
Content Decryption Modules Information
Key System Name Video Robustness Audio Robustness Capabilities Clear Lead HDCP 2.2 Compatible
org.w3.clearkey {"persistent":"Optional","distinctive":"NotAllowed","sessionType":"[Temporary]","codec":{"decodingAndDecrypting":[],"decryptingOnly":["h264(all)","aac(all)","flac(all)","opus(all)","vp9(all)","av1(all)","vorbis(all)","vp8(all)"]}} No No


[CNK]

Mozilla's Firefox builds have ALSA support disabled, so you'll need PulseAudio or apulse installed for sound (not tested).

For HW acceleration try loading extensions: libpci graphics-KERNEL libEGL

[Juanito]

The existing firefox extension (128.2.0esr) has hardware acceleration enabled with the Xorg-3d extension.

You can check under about:support and should see something like:

Code: [Select]

GPU #1
Active Yes
Description V3D 7.1.10.2

[mortegai]

Yes, it appears

Code: [Select]

GPU #1
Active Yes
Description V3D 4.12.14.0
I also get sound with apulse.