Funding further work: Now that Chromium works reasonably well for my personal use, it's difficult for me to justify putting much time into it, other than periodically updating to trunk. However, if you would like to donate towards fixing some of these remaining issues, such as the rendering flakiness or v8 issues on i386, you can do so by clicking on the button below. You can also enclose a message on which of the remaining bugs are most important to you.
To build: I'm building from the git repository with these step-by-step build instructions, based on Ben's original build instructions and patches. You can apply my latest Chromium patch and then some third party library svn diffs. These are the only two patches you should need, further build notes are listed below. I first built Chromium for FreeBSD on the build server graciously provided by John Companies.
If you'd like to pitch in or report errors not listed below, you can reach me at spree at jaggeri dot com.
Common errors (3/06)
Two processes don't stop when you exit, mounting fdescfs will take care of one of them. The rendered HTML in a tab will occasionally freeze up; I find the flaky tab works again if I switch to another tab and load a new page, then switch back to the tab that acted up. Dragging tabs will now crash the browser because of a regression upstream. Chromium's ALSA driver can leave the speaker in an indeterminate state where it keeps repeating a certain sound: you can fix it by closing the tab that has a HTML 5 video loaded, by loading another HTML 5 video, or by restarting the browser if the first two don't work. On the rare occasion that Chromium crashes, you will need to clean up shared memory with
ipcrm -vW.
Build Modifications
- When rebuilding Chromium with python 2.6, os.chflags causes problems on zfs
- I used to work around this by deleting out/Release/gen or other directories generated by previous builds but that would cause much longer builds. I've now commented out the os.chflags line from /usr/local/lib/python2.6/shutil.py and it works fine.
- socketpair systemcall
- FreeBSD does not usually support SOCK_SEQPACKET yet. That's the same reason the linux Chromium build didn't run on FreeBSD with the f10 emulation layer, I have it fall back to SOCK_DGRAM to get it to work.
- SysV shared memory
- FreeBSD's SysV IPC shared memory implementation works differently than it does on linux, so the rendered HTML bitmaps were being stored in shared memory by the WebKit renderer but Chromium couldn't access them. I fixed this by moving the shmctl(shmkey, IPC_RMID, 0) system call to the destructor, rather than earlier on where it was being called in the linux build. However, there's a reason it was called so early, so that a crash would properly clean up shared memory. This change necessitates the aforementioned shared memory cleanup upon the rare Chromium crash on FreeBSD. It may be corrected by moving to a different shared memory implementation.
- sockaddr struct casting that caused SSL problem
- Apparently the sockaddr datastructure is defined differently in FreeBSD than linux, so where it could be directly cast and passed to NSS in linux, the same line caused problems in FreeBSD. I made the assignment more explicit to avoid this linuxism and SSL now works.