Chrome on PowerPC

Gary Thomas

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Jul 6, 2010, 9:36:50 AM7/6/10

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Has the Chrome browser ever been built for a PowerPC target?

When I tried it (using OpenEmbedded), it failed immediately because it
[somehow] thought it was building for ARMv7 (the Makefile has ARMv7a
options in it)

Any ideas what it might take to get it running on PowerPC?

dhw

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Jul 6, 2010, 11:28:40 AM7/6/10

to Chromium-discuss, Gary Thomas

One of Chrome's key components is the V8 Javascript engine.

Currently, there is no V8 compiler for the PowerPC architecture.

I wonder if there are interested parties to write it?

Søren Gjesse

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Jul 30, 2010, 8:20:35 AM7/30/10

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There has been a few posts on v8-dev regarding a PowerPC port, e.g.

http://groups.google.com/group/v8-dev/browse_thread/thread/71dc2e120f3e977/ea56e992701da0f4?lnk=gst&q=PowerPC#ea56e992701da0f4. However it is a huge undertaking, and to get it feature complete will probably take some time.

For a "proof of concept" build testing the other components of Chromium you could run V8 ARM code in the ARM simulator. JavaScript performance will be very poor, but everything should run.

On Linux running

export GYP_DEFINES="target_arch=ia32 v8_target_arch=arm"

gclient runhooks

make chrome

should build chrome with V8 running ARM code in the ARM simulator.

Regards,

Søren

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axuak

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Jul 31, 2012, 12:41:21 PM7/31/12

to chromium...@chromium.org, d...@chromium.org, Gary Thomas

Is the ARM simulator unique to the Linux kernel? I would really like to build this for Darwin PPC (Tiger). I have gcc 4.2... I sure would love to build this for my 1 GHz Titanium PowerBook G4. I would be welcome to testing on some hardware...

Let me know,
Andrew

Jakob Kummerow

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Aug 1, 2012, 8:01:58 AM8/1/12

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AFAIK the ARM simulator has nothing to do with Linux, it should work on MacOS as well. (Not sure how well that's tested, though.)

Note that as Søren said, such a build will *not* be useful for day-to-day web surfing. JavaScript performance will be slower than a real port by a factor of 100 (sic!) or more.

Also note that Tiger is not an officially supported target platform for Chrome/Chromium. Last I heard even support for 10.5/Leopard was being phased out. So it may or may not work at all on Tiger (regardless of CPU architecture).

Nathan David

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Jun 14, 2016, 5:06:22 AM6/14/16

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You can get a copy of Virtual PC or download (Q emulator (Free) ) and emulate Windows and run Google Chrome in that.
And I'll try to see if I can recompile Google Chrome or something like that for it to work on PPC

Nathan David

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Jun 14, 2016, 5:06:22 AM6/14/16

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I am currently working on making Chrome work on PPC machines

Nathan David

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Jun 14, 2016, 5:06:22 AM6/14/16

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What you can do is find Q emulator or Virtual PC and run Google Chrome in the emulation of Windows.

Also I will try to make Google Chrome available to the PowerPC.

Aaron Blakely

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Sep 2, 2016, 1:18:47 PM9/2/16

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node.js works fine which uses v8. Still no ppc targets though, ran into this problem last night trying to build chromium.

On Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 8:36:50 AM UTC-5, Gary Thomas wrote:

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