Chromium browser – 662 days old

[Grogan]

Did you specify the correct path to chrome_sandbox in the gyp configure command? It must be specified at compile time and then must be in that location at runtime. Did you remember to set chrome_sandbox SUID root? (chmod 4555). Anything stupid like SELinux enabled? (I hate that... it causes more problems than its worth for normal desktop or server use of a system)

By the way, I've greatly simplified my install. When I first started, I expected to make /opt/chromium a tree with lib and bin etc. and add environment variables. I ended up being silly with symlinks to make it so, but that proved unnecessary. It can simply run out of /opt/chromium (I just create symlinks to the chrome and chrome_sandbox binaries in /usr/local/bin)

Configure:

build/gyp_chromium --depth=. -Dgcc_version=45 -Duse_gconf=0 -Ddisable_nacl=1 -Duse_gnome_keyring=0 -Dlinux_link_gnome_keyring=0 -Dremove_webcore_debug_symbols=1 -Dremoting=0 -Dchromeos=0 -Dwerror=0 -Dno_strict_aliasing=1 -Dwerror= -Dlinux_sandbox_path=/opt/chromium/chrome_sandbox -Dlinux_strip_binary=1 -Dproprietary_codecs=1 -Duse_system_libjpeg=0 -Duse_libjpeg_turbo=1 -Duse_system_libxslt=0 -Duse_system_libxml=0 -Duse_system_bzip2=1 -Duse_system_zlib=0 -Duse_system_libpng=0 -Duse_system_yasm=1 -Duse_system_libevent=0 -Dffmpeg_branding=Chrome -Duse_system_ffmpeg=0 -Duse_system_ssl=0

I have not compiled this on any system but Slackware and some of the above may not be necessary or appropriate for Debian/oogabooga'ish distros. GCC version? Gnome shit like gconf, gnome keyring would likely be available on your system, remoting (disabled for Slackware because it requires PAM) could be enabled as well.

Compile:

CFLAGS="-march=core2 -fPIC" CXXFLAGS="-march=core2 -fPIC -fno-ipa-cp" make chrome chrome_sandbox BUILDTYPE=Release -j10 V=1

(Note that I add -fPIC only because the entire distro is compiled that way. I carried on with it for all the packages I've (re)built and all other builds. I'm not sure why Slackware adds that to the CFLAGS of every compile. All I know is that on x86_64 there is no penalty for doing so. Don't do it on x86... position independent code is best only used for libraries. It will be used where necessary in a build.

I am betting that he had a few build failures because the linker on x86_64 is less forgiving when PIC is NOT used when necessary, as I have in the past, so it was added to every build. I can't seem to find a straight answer on that though.

I would remove -fPIC if not compiling on Slackware 64)

This is how I install it (it greatly simplifies the script). This goes in the directory above the chromium-$VERSION build directory and is executed from there ($DIR). I edit VERSION= before running the script. I could probably do something more complex with ls -l and cut etc. so it could be automatically found, but bleh... I hate that shit and I don't mind having one last look over before pulling the trigger anyway.

#! /bin/sh

VERSION=18.0.969.0
DIR=`pwd`

rm -rf /opt/chromium
mkdir -p /opt/chromium
rm -f /usr/share/pixmaps/chromium.png
cd $DIR/chromium-$VERSION/out/Release
strip -p chrome
strip -p chrome_sandbox
strip -p --strip-unneeded libffmpegsumo.so
cp chrome /opt/chromium
cp chrome_sandbox /opt/chromium
chmod 4555 /opt/chromium/chrome_sandbox
cp *.pak /opt/chromium
cp libffmpegsumo.so /opt/chromium
cp product_logo_48.png /usr/share/pixmaps/chromium.png
cp -a locales /opt/chromium
cp -a resources /opt/chromium
chown -R root:root /opt/chromium/locales
chown -R root:root /opt/chromium/resources
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -sf /opt/chromium/chrome chrome
ln -sf /opt/chromium/chrome_sandbox chrome_sandbox

There is just no need to package this up and install it to the system. It's pretty much self contained except for needing to be found in the PATH. I chose to symlink in /usr/local/bin instead of adding /opt/chromium to a PATH variable.

[Dark Angel]

That's exactly how I'm doing it, using the commands you posted and that script, which is how you posted you did it a while back. I'm running it again now without the -fPIC flags to see what happens.

[Dark Angel]

Just tried installing their pre-packaged version. It doesn't throw errors but it's slow as shit on that test page (18fps). I must have done something stupid here somewhere.

[Dark Angel]

Cleaned up some multilib crap that I don't remember installing and got rid of a second version of gcc to avoid confusion. Now compiling a more recent kernel and installing current nvidia drivers. Once that's all sorted then I'll come back to this.
Bloody Firefox 8 compiled with nowhere near this much trouble.

[Grogan]

Yep, Chromium is a bit more finicky than Firefox. I'm just glad I have mine down pat as this is now my favourite browser. It took a bit of buggering about to come up with that procedure.

Gone are the days when developers made great efforts so that users could compile their software easily. It's the Ubuntu for the masses mentality. (Don't bother the developers, use your distro's packages). Ironically, things used to be easier when Linux was hard

[Dark Angel]

That wouldn't be so bad if the versions in the repos weren't SO out of date (or compiled so genericly that you never see anything like the package's potential performance on any given system).

[Bad Haircut]

But that's straight Debian for you though. Stability, works on anything and things go at a glacial pace with no rigid release dates - and it's massive, It's why Ubuntu came about to try to get the best of both worlds, stable platform, reasonably up to date, and good spread, of main packages. It delivered for the most part. Straight Debian is for fans of straight Debian and what it offers, certainly ain't for everyone, including me.

[Dark Angel]

Ubuntu is very "Debian" in that respect. Yeah there's lots of updates but when it comes to version changes to the various apps, like Firefox etc, you have to wait till the next release and upgrade EVERYTHING. If you just want a fresher Chromium you still have to do that your self. Debian so far hasn't shit me except for this compile issue. This is getting annoying.

[Dark Angel]

The answer to the question "how long till DA gets sick of Debian?" would be: not long. I'm already rebuilding Slackware. Having to keep on top of updates myself is a PIA but at least shit will compile properly.

[ZemaTalon]

The answer to the question "how long till DA gets sick of Debian?" would be: not long. I'm already rebuilding Slackware. Having to keep on top of updates myself is a PIA but at least shit will compile properly.

Maybe a Slack-based distro that adds an optional update management system and repository?

[Dark Angel]

For my purposes being up to the second up to date is overkill anyway. I'm probably just too accustomed to seeing updates pop up every other day from Ubuntu.

[Grogan]

Yes, you don't have to install updates. I upgrade things when I need new versions, not because some annoying notification icon tells me to.

I tend to keep web browsers up to date... but I always have build procedures worked out.

I treat Slackware like a source distro... once a working system is installed I replace everything with packages I build from source and no more precompiled packages get installed ever. Once I get off that beaten track (like I am now) I don't even roll up slackware packages anymore because I'm out of sync and there's no point trying to get caught up with Slackware-current. I'll just upgrade libraries as needed.

[Dark Angel]

I'll be trying to do something like that from here on. Once I get this back to where I was I'll try and behave myself ... more or less.

[Dark Angel]

Ok, chromium compiles now but the performance is terrible. Best I got on that test is 22fps. I've got to be missing something somewhere.

[Bad Haircut]

Just checked, I get 25fps in the Chromium from the Kububtu repo (15.0.874.106 (Developer Build 107270), and I never actually noticed any performance drop while surfing with it....but now you've pointed it out, I'm going to have to follow those instructions on their site and compile it and see what happens.

[Dark Angel]

Last time I got chromium working right it was belting through that test at 60+ and change, so I know it CAN be done, I just have to work out HOW I did it.

[Grogan]

You do recall that you will have to probably force direct rendering to be used?

Remember about:flags... there are a few options in there to override the whitelist and always use blah blah blah for all canvas. I'm too tired to look right now... it's bed.

[Dark Angel]

You do recall that you will have to probably force direct rendering to be used?

Remember about:flags... there are a few options in there to override the whitelist and always use blah blah blah for all canvas. I'm too tired to look right now... it's bed.

Yep, went into about:flags and enabled direct rendering but it made no difference this time. I'm still playing with it.

[Bad Haircut]

I didn't know about about:flags and just enabled 'Override software rendering list'. 'GPU compositing on all pages' and 'Composited render layer borders' and clicked the 'Relaunch Now' button at the bottom to save - on the above package manager version, and I'm now getting 60+ fps.

[Dark Angel]

For some reason I'm not getting any love from those flags at all. Seems like this build just refuses to use hardware rendering for some reason.

[Grogan]

Actually, I'm sorry for not checking, but it appears that mine is broken too. I wasn't sure what test you were referring to, but if it's:

http://demos.hacks.mozilla.org/openweb/HWACCEL/

I'm only getting 16 FPS on that test now.

I noticed a new setting in about:flags

GPU Accelerated Drawing
Enable GPU accelerated drawing of page contents when compositing is enabled.

I enabled it and not only doesn't it help, it causes a strange highlighting artifact periodically (refresh and it's gone) on forum listings here.

I did not think there was a problem because some WebGL stuff works but I noticed something wrong just now. I went to play something that used to work, and the browser crashes every time. Then I thought to go back and find that test again.

This is Chromium 18.0.969.0 from several days ago. (Going to try a new one today)

Catalyst 11.11... it could be related because my Firefox doesn't seem to be doing direct rendering anymore either, where it used to work. (I haven't been using Firefox anymore so mine is still version 8.0)

[Dark Angel]

That actually helps me in that I now know (or at least feel it's reasonable to think) that it's not my fault at all. I'll go back to earlier source and see if that fixes it.

[Grogan]

It's got to be fairly recent, because I know I've been to this not long ago. (week and a half ago?)

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/det...eams-of-black/

(I really like that particular demo and go to it relatively often... music and interactive fly-by type animations)

I found today that Chromium crashes on that and it's what made me think that *I* might have a problem lol

[Bad Haircut]

That is absolutely brilliant

[Grogan]

Actually, fuck this. Enough of this big brotherly crap. Chromium won't even let me download the catalyst drivers now, because:

Duplicate headers received from server
The response from the server contained duplicate headers. This problem is generally the result of a misconfigured website or proxy. Only the website or proxy administrator can fix this issue.
Error 349 (net::ERR_RESPONSE_HEADERS_MULTIPLE_CONTENT_DISPOSITION): Multiple Content-Disposition headers received. This is disallowed to protect against HTTP response splitting attacks.

There is fucking nothing wrong with that... the download form works in other browsers and I don't care about their ideology.

Back to Firefox for me. This is the last straw.

Also, my next video card is going to be Nvidia again, because fglrx has been a royal pain in the ass. It's good lately, but I'm tired of second guessing it all the time. The card has been great for games in Windows, but there's more to life than that.

I was about to waste my whole Sunday on this horseshit but I caught myself.

[Grogan]

OK, I was just having a shit fit. Nothing that couldn't be fixed herbaciously. Back to troubleshooting this (and firefox)

I am actually going to try Catalyst 11.12 because they have been screwing around with OpenGL (and reverting changes) at least in Windows. There's more to it than just the driver (kernel module). There's a Linux 3.1.5 kernel anyway that has some significant looking bug fixes.

[Grogan]

Umm, Catalyst 11.12 drivers certainly did have an affect... now my Chromium build won't display pages at all. It shows a black screen. The pages are there, because if you hover you can see link status text and stuff.

Something obviously needs to go here, I haven't decided which yet.

[Dark Angel]

I'm going back to my old source and slackbuild files to see it that works. If it does then great, you'll know pretty quick. If not then it's something I've done differently here, though I have NO idea what that might be.

[Grogan]

I'm probably going back to Chromium 17.x (I'm guessing that 18.x is where the problems started. I just did a new build and still get the black screen)

I now can't use GPU acceleration at all in Chromium, with the current 11.12 ATI drivers. I can "feel it", too... the snap is gone and scrolling big long Slashdot comment threads is a bit laggy again. I was at least getting good 2D acceleration before with GPU accelerated rendering even though some of the 3D shit was broken without my knowledge.

I'll go back to an older ATI driver if I have to as well.

[Grogan]

OK... I went back to the last 17.x tarball (which was actually newer than some of the 18's and still had the badness for me). That gave me partial functionality, like I had before installing the new catalyst drivers today. Odd coincidence, that. Still broken for the things I wanted it to be not broken for. (Some webgl tests pass and some demos work. It invariably crashes the tab when it doesn't work)

So I went back a bit further. I picked... nov 28, my birthday. That's before the changes (and symptomatically, before they split out the new "Enable GPU accelerated drawing of page contents when compositing is enabled." setting)

I have full functionality back with tarball version 17.0.953.0 and my favourite demo works again. (yay!)

This is still with the Catalyst 11.12 driver. It only caused a problem (the black screen) with the bad 18's, (and not with the last 17 which still had the bad behaviour)

I could probably go forward several more snapshots, but I wanted to make sure I went far enough back this time so as not to self flagellate.

These tarballs are all still available here:
http://gsdview.appspot.com/chromium-browser-official/

[Dark Angel]

Sweet. I'm downloading that one now to play with. At least I can be sure that source works.

[Grogan]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention something rather irritating. Chromium will not go backwards with user profiles. It refuses to load any profile that's been touched by a newer version of Chromium. It pops up a dialog apologizing and informing you that you must specify a new profile directory, or use a newer version of chromium.

That's /home/yourname/.config/chromium and the cache and similar junk is in .cache/chromium

I've just been deleting those after installing older versions and reconfiguring all my settings again. (including about:flags)

[Dark Angel]

Thanks for that. Deleted both. We'll see how it all plays soon enough.

[Dark Angel]

got my hardware rendering back! Holy snappin' duckshit is this thing fast! I don't know what they did to fekk it up so bad in the 18 series though.

[Grogan]

It probably works for xorg DRI (broken on Nvidia, broken on fglrx) and in common OSS fashion, the developers don't care because closed source drivers shouldn't exist. (The new code isn't mainstream yet and Google doesn't care yet either that people can't deliberately override their whitelisting)

I noticed the difference when I had to disable hardware acceleration entirely. As I said the "snap" was gone.

I'm going to have to be more careful from now on, upgrading this. I think I'll stay at exactly this for a while.

[Dark Angel]

When I started trying to build this again I was running the default nuveau (sp?) driver for my nvidia card. I changed to the proper nvidia driver later but it made no difference. This build still has a couple of niggles, like the "top five" stats on the "Forum" page here being broken, but overall it works and has the speed I expected.

[Grogan]

The Top 5 stat thing on the Forums page works correctly for me. I normally keep it collapsed because it's something that has to be reloaded when I hit the back button, but I just checked and it's still working.

(I mean... I navigate the boards by checking for new posts using "Today's Posts". To check again, I hit the back button to go back to Forums, then click Today's Posts again. When I use the back button to go back to Forums, I want it to be instant, coming from RAM and that Top 5 stats thing needs to be downloaded every time, and also at intervals if displayed. Collapsing it makes it so it doesn't load, and that setting is stored in the cookie)

[ZemaTalon]

Half the time the Top 5 Stats fails to load when I hit the back button, no matter which browser (between Chrome, Chromium, and FF). I like to leave it up while I'm busy doing other things so I can see what's going on at a glance, but half the time I end up having to reload the whole forum page to get it going again.

[Dark Angel]

The Top 5 stat thing on the Forums page works correctly for me. I normally keep it collapsed because it's something that has to be reloaded when I hit the back button, but I just checked and it's still working.

(I mean... I navigate the boards by checking for new posts using "Today's Posts". To check again, I hit the back button to go back to Forums, then click Today's Posts again. When I use the back button to go back to Forums, I want it to be instant, coming from RAM and that Top 5 stats thing needs to be downloaded every time, and also at intervals if displayed. Collapsing it makes it so it doesn't load, and that setting is stored in the cookie)

This is what I'm getting:
top5.jpg

as an aside, the attachments windows don't work quite right either, as I just discovered.
This stupid shit is getting on my nerves.

[Dark Angel]

It might loads stuff fast but there's no point if it can't display things properly. I'll try building the new Firefox 9.0 and see how it runs.