1470772 - mingw-w64 builds crash on start-up after bug 1467041 landed on ESR60

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Georg Koppen]

While testing our RC for our first ESR60-based alpha Tor Browser it turned out that the bundles on Windows are suddenly crashing during start-up (even before a normal Firefox would show the profile selection dialog) which was not the case when using ESR 60.0.1.

After some bisecting it turned out that the fix for bug 1467041 is causing this. For now I reverted that one for our Windows builds (+ the fix for bug 1464084 to be on the safe side).

We build with GCC 6.4.0 and binutils being essentially 2.26.1.

Comment 1

[Kim Moir [:kmoir] ET]

Triaging an ni'ing :glandium since bug 1467041 was his fix.

Comment 2

[Nathan Froyd [:froydnj]]

Are --gc-sections or --icf=safe known to have problems on mingw64 or binutils 2.26.1 specifically?

Comment 3

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

So I updated my esr branch and sent a try run: https://treeherder.mozilla.org/#/jobs?repo=try&revision=fae48d846d631884ccb722ef87ae08946d38f7ed&selectedJob=184992848  It's building with --enable-release but isn't crashing.

Comment 4

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

We narrowed this down to --gc-sections; but that doesn't cause a crash for me in TreeHerder, so it's either a patch Tor has that Mozilla doesn't or a slight toolchian difference between Tor and Mozilla.

Comment 5

[Mike Hommey [:glandium]]

Is the startup crash in nsComponentManagerImpl::InitializeStaticModules ?

Comment 6

[Jacek Caban]

(In reply to Nathan Froyd [:froydnj] (away until 16 July 2018) from comment #2)
> Are --gc-sections or --icf=safe known to have problems on mingw64 or
> binutils 2.26.1 specifically?

I think it's considered not well tested.

Comment 7

[Tom Ritter [:tjr] (OOTO until 4/30 at least)]

It's crashing in https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/a80651653faa78fa4dfbd238d099c2aad1cec304/toolkit/xre/nsAppRunner.cpp#3224

Specifically, it can't access detail::gChaosModeCounter

Comment 8

[Georg Koppen]

The problem is https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19803. Some fixes for it made it into 2.27 which Mozilla is using but we use 2.26.1. In particular, https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=commitdiff;h=4153b6dbb0f38a16fd5b583761aa811212fbb9a5 solves the crash we are seeing.

Marking this as WONTFIX on Mozilla's side and we'll look into either backporting the necessary patch or hopefully bumping our binutils version (which is unfortunately blocked on https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23466).