Mozilla Builds

4:29 AM Nik 2 Comments

I have started working on a student project in Mozilla which requires using Milepost GCC to speed up Firefox. I started with doing a few builds of Firefox, both by using Mercurial and downloading the source code archive directly. I faced a few problems during the build process. After taking a lot of time for the build, it would crash on me giving errors like "vsnprintf not found", "fprintf not found" etc. After trying all possible options, I googled the errors and even found a related bug already filed:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=485019
But the bug is marked "Resolved Invalid" (I have no idea what that means). Anyways, once I found that it was the breakpad which was causing problems, I disabled the crashreporter in the mozconfig file and that worked. So I managed to do some optimization and debug builds.

After that I moved onto Profile Guided Optimization Builds, which I believe Mozilla is currently using for its releases. A PGO build consists of two passes: a first pass to build binaries, then a second pass to re-build optimized binaries using profile information extracted by running the first binaries. I managed to successfully build firefox 3.6 with PGO.

I have moved on currently to studying Milepost GCC for now, but I'll be back to the builds to examine the makefiles and the code changes between normal and PGO builds, because I'll need to know how the builds actually work.