SpiderMonkey from Firefox-115.5.0

Installation of SpiderMonkey

Note

Unlike most other packages in BLFS, the instructions below require you to untar firefox-115.5.0esr.tar.xz and change into the firefox-115.5.0 folder.

Extracting the tarball will reset the permissions of the current directory to 0755 if you have permission to do that. If you do this in a directory where the sticky bit is set, such as /tmp it will end with error messages:

tar: .: Cannot utime: Operation not permitted
tar: .: Cannot change mode to rwxr-xr-t: Operation not permitted
tar: Exiting with failure status due to previous errors

This does finish with non-zero status, but it does NOT mean there is a real problem. Do not untar as the root user in a directory where the sticky bit is set - that will unset it.

The building system ships several internal copies of the Python 3 module six.py. The shipped copies are too old to work well with Python 3.12 or later. Replace them with the symlinks to six-1.16.0 already installed on the system:

for i in $(find -name six.py); do
  ln -sfv /usr/lib/python3.12/site-packages/six.py $i;
done

Install SpiderMonkey by running the following commands:

Note

If you are compiling this package in chroot you must ensure that /dev/shm is mounted. If you do not do this, the Python configuration will fail with a traceback report referencing /usr/lib/pythonN.N/multiprocessing/synchronize.py. As the root user, run:

mountpoint -q /dev/shm || mount -t tmpfs devshm /dev/shm

Compiling the C++ code respects $MAKEFLAGS and defaults to 'j1', the rust code will use all processors.

mkdir obj &&
cd    obj &&

../js/src/configure --prefix=/usr            \
                    --disable-debug-symbols  \
                    --disable-jemalloc       \
                    --enable-readline        \
                    --enable-rust-simd       \
                    --with-intl-api          \
                    --with-system-icu        \
                    --with-system-zlib       &&
make

To run the SpiderMonkey test suite, issue: make -C js/src check-jstests JSTESTS_EXTRA_ARGS="--timeout 300 --wpt=disabled". It's recommended to redirect the output into a log. Because we are building with system ICU, 41 tests (out of a total of more than 50,000) are known to fail. The test suite is executed with all CPU cores available: even in a cgroup with less cores assigned, it still attempts to spawn as many testing jobs as the number of all cores in the system; fortunately the kernel still won't run these jobs on cores not assigned to the cgroup so the CPU usage is still controlled.

To run the JIT test suite, issue: make -C js/src check-jit-test JITTEST_EXTRA_ARGS="--timeout 300". Like the SpiderMonkey test suite, the number of test jobs is same as the number of all CPU cores in the system even if a cgroup is used. To make things worse, there are six tests each of them will use 3 GB of system memory, so the peak memory usage may be up to 18 GB if the number of cores is six or more. Running the JIT test suite without enough memory may invoke the kernel OOM killer and cause stability issues. If you don't have enough system memory available, append -jN after --timeout 300 with N replaced by the number of parallel test jobs you want to start. For example, if you have 16 GB system memory available and 8 CPU cores, issue make -C js/src check-jit-test JITTEST_EXTRA_ARGS="--timeout=300 -j5" to run the test with 5 parallel jobs so the memory usage won't exceed 15 GB.

Caution

An issue in the installation process causes any running program which links to SpiderMonkey shared library (for example, GNOME Shell) to crash if SpiderMonkey is reinstalled, or upgraded or downgraded without a change of the major version number (115 in 115.5.0). To work around this issue, remove the old version of the SpiderMonkey shared library before installation:

rm -fv /usr/lib/libmozjs-115.so

Now, as the root user:

make install &&
rm -v /usr/lib/libjs_static.ajs &&
sed -i '/@NSPR_CFLAGS@/d' /usr/bin/js115-config