The first thing to know is there's a community of people using POWER9 workstations, whether for actual "work" or just as personal computers for, well, personal use. In both cases, web browsers are very important.
These devices support basically all the DRM GPU drivers in Linux, and when coupled with Mesa, have very fast and responsive GUIs. Both Firefox and Chromium run well, but up until now, Firefox has been using a pure interpreter to run javascript. This is fine for sites not using much javascript, but a big chunk of the modern web quite literally loads megabytes worth of JS on a page, and it can really chug under the interpreter.
So it's pretty exciting that we'll have a second browser with a proper JS engine, Chromium being the first (IBM ported V8 to ppc64le, for node.js, but the port works for running chromium as well)
Also because it may not be clear, the other big arches all already have JIT compilers. x86, amd64, 32 and 64 bit ARM, (and I think MIPS does, on either chromium or firefox, don't recall), so this is less about boosting performance, and more about reaching "baseline expected performance".
MIPS has a JIT on both, though it's mipsle, not "classic" BE MIPS like sgimips. It's more targeted to CPUs like Loongson.
Anyway, I'm trying to go as fast as I can to get an actual browser mounted. But passing the test suites in totality, run two different ways, suggests a high probability of success at this point.
Greatly looking forward to it. Thanks for all your work on Firefox and PowerPC at-large. Being able to use Firefox for the JS heavy sites I've had to use Chromium for will be very, very nice. :-)
These devices support basically all the DRM GPU drivers in Linux, and when coupled with Mesa, have very fast and responsive GUIs. Both Firefox and Chromium run well, but up until now, Firefox has been using a pure interpreter to run javascript. This is fine for sites not using much javascript, but a big chunk of the modern web quite literally loads megabytes worth of JS on a page, and it can really chug under the interpreter.
So it's pretty exciting that we'll have a second browser with a proper JS engine, Chromium being the first (IBM ported V8 to ppc64le, for node.js, but the port works for running chromium as well)
Also because it may not be clear, the other big arches all already have JIT compilers. x86, amd64, 32 and 64 bit ARM, (and I think MIPS does, on either chromium or firefox, don't recall), so this is less about boosting performance, and more about reaching "baseline expected performance".