SpiderMonkey is Mozilla's JavaScript and WebAssembly Engine, written in C++ and Rust. In BLFS, the source code of SpiderMonkey is taken from Firefox.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Development versions of BLFS may not build or run some packages properly if LFS or dependencies have been updated since the most recent stable versions of the books.
Download (HTTP): https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/140.14.0esr/source/firefox-140.14.0esr.source.tar.xz
Download MD5 sum: c2eb4ac79de8b34cb3353272bea1cbd3
Download size: 614 MB
Estimated disk space required: 4.7 GB (55 MB installed after removing 42 MB static lib; add 29 MB for the main and jit tests)
Estimated build time: 1.9 SBU (with parallelism=4; add 0.4 SBU for the main tests and 2.6 SBU for the jit tests)
Cbindgen-0.29.4, ICU-78.3, Which-2.25
LLVM-23.1.0 (with Clang, required for 32-bit systems without SSE2 capabilities)
![[Important]](../images/important.png)
If you are building this package on a 32-bit system, and Clang is
not installed or you're overriding the default compiler choice
with the environment variable CXX,
please read the Command Explanations section first.
Unlike most other packages in BLFS, the instructions below
require you to untar firefox-140.14.0esr.tar.xz and change into the
firefox-140.14.0 directory.
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.
First, apply a patch to fix compatibility with Python 3.14:
patch -Np1 -i ../spidermonkey-140.14.0-python_3.14_fixes-1.patch
Fix building this package with rustc 1.98 or newer:
patch -Np1 -i ../spidermonkey-140.14.0-rust_1_98-1.patch
The configuration of SpiderMonkey
is accomplished by creating a mozconfig file containing the desired
configuration options. A default mozconfig is created below. To see the entire
list of available configuration options (and a brief description of
each), issue ./mach configure --
--help | less. Create the file with the following
command:
cat > mozconfig << "EOF"
ac_add_options --prefix=/usr
ac_add_options --enable-project=js
ac_add_options --disable-debug-symbols
ac_add_options --disable-jemalloc
ac_add_options --enable-readline
ac_add_options --enable-rust-simd
ac_add_options --with-intl-api
ac_add_options --with-system-icu
ac_add_options --with-system-zlib
EOF
Now invoke the Python mach script to compile SpiderMonkey:
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
export MACH_BUILD_PYTHON_NATIVE_PACKAGE_SOURCE=none && export MOZBUILD_STATE_PATH=$(pwd)/mozbuild && ./mach build
To run the SpiderMonkey test suite, issue:
./mach jstests
Because we are building with system ICU, a little over 100 tests, depending on ICU version, (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 the following command:
./mach jit-test
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, some test cases can use up to 4 GB of
system memory, so the peak memory usage may be very large if your
CPU have multiple cores. 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
-j to the command and replace
NN with the number of test
jobs your available system memory can hold. For example, if you
have 15 GB system memory available and 4 CPU cores, append
-j3 to run the test suite with 3
parallel jobs so the memory usage won't exceed 12 GB.
![[Caution]](../images/caution.png)
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 (140 in 140.14.0). To work around this issue, remove the old version of the SpiderMonkey shared library before installation:
rm -fv /usr/lib/libmozjs-140.so
Install SpiderMonkey by running
the following commands as the root
user:
MACH_BUILD_PYTHON_NATIVE_PACKAGE_SOURCE=none ./mach install
Still as the root user, remove a
useless and very large static library, and remove a buggy output of
the js140-config
script:
rm -v /usr/lib/libjs_static.ajs && sed -i '/@NSPR_CFLAGS@/d' /usr/bin/js140-config
Still as the root user, fix an
issue with one of the installed headers:
sed '$i#define XP_UNIX' -i /usr/include/mozjs-140/js-config.h
Empty the environment variables which were set above:
unset MACH_BUILD_PYTHON_NATIVE_PACKAGE_SOURCE && unset MOZBUILD_STATE_PATH
MOZBUILD_STATE_PATH=${PWD}/mozbuild:
Override the default location (${HOME}/.mozbuild) for the cache of the build
system, to avoid polluting the home directory.
--disable-debug-symbols:
Don't generate debug symbols since they are very large and most
users won't need it. Remove it if you want to debug SpiderMonkey.
--disable-jemalloc: This
switch disables the internal memory allocator used in SpiderMonkey.
jemalloc is only intended for the Firefox browser environment. For
other applications using SpiderMonkey, the application may crash as
items allocated in the jemalloc allocator are freed on the system
(glibc) allocator.
--enable-readline: This
switch enables Readline support in the SpiderMonkey command line
interface.
--enable-rust-simd: This
switch enables SIMD optimization in the shipped encoding_rs crate.
--with-intl-api: This
enables the internationalization functions required by Gjs.
--with-system-*: These
parameters allow the build system to use system versions of the
above libraries. These are required for stability.
export CC=gcc and
export CXX=g++: BLFS
use to prefer to use gcc and g++ instead of upstream's defaults of
the clang programs. With the
release of gcc-12 the build takes longer with gcc and g++,
primarily because of extra warnings, and is bigger. Put these two
commands into the mozconfig file if
you wish to continue to use gcc and g++. If you are building on a
32-bit system, also see below.
export CXXFLAGS="$CXXFLAGS -msse2
-mfpmath=sse": Use SSE2 instead of 387 for
double-precision floating-point operations. It's needed to satisfy
the expectations of upstream (Mozilla) developers with
floating-point arithmetic (meaning, a 32-bit processor lacking SSE2
is not capable to run this package). Add it to mozconfig if you are building this package on a
32-bit system with GCC. This setting is not needed with Clang,
neither with GCC on a 64-bit system because those configurations
have SSE2 enabled by default.