Google Chrome(the browser) on ARM

Hi,

Some weeks ago i got bored and tried to build www-client/chromium natively on ARM, armv5tel-softfloat to be exact.

-The first thing i got is that it uses a lot of RAM to build, using all of the 512MB of RAM the Marvell Sheevaplug has. Since we have a Marvell board that was donated to us that is able to use sticks of RAM, it has 3GB of RAM, i decided to build chromium on that machine.

-Second, failed to build. It tried to use x86 assembler code, obviously that wasn’t going to work. The ubuntu guys started playing with it as well on ARM. Obviously they have time and hardware, and they also get paid for it. They fixed the issues and they forwarded the fixes to upstream, which were applied quickly.

-Third, i was able to build it, took some hours, around 10 hours. After starting it, it crashes with an X error. If i execute it again, it “works”. I say “works” because its not able to open Google’s web page, but its able to open gentoo.org and forums.gentoo.org. Its probably due to javascript not working…

The Gentoo ARM users who want to emerge www-client/chromium they can do so, i added the parameters that was needed for it to build on ARM:
-Dtarget_arch=arm -Ddisable_nacl=1 -Dv8_use_snapshot=false -Dlinux_use_tcmalloc=0

I didn’t keyword it, though, as for what i said on the third comment, i feel its still a bit buggy and doesn’t deserve a keyword yet.

(the red dots are due to my graphic card, its a bit burned out)

I also created a binpkg for it: http://dev.gentoo.org/~armin76/arm/chromium-9999.tbz2

Let me know how it goes 🙂
I found it rather interesting that at runtime it doesn’t eat too much RAM…