[tor-bugs] #12631 [Applications/Tor Browser]: Tor Browser for ARM architecture

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#12631: Tor Browser for ARM architecture
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 Reporter:  mttp                      |          Owner:  (none)
     Type:  project                   |         Status:  new
 Priority:  Medium                    |      Milestone:
Component:  Applications/Tor Browser  |        Version:
 Severity:  Normal                    |     Resolution:
 Keywords:  tbb-rbm                   |  Actual Points:
Parent ID:                            |         Points:
 Reviewer:                            |        Sponsor:
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Comment (by JeremyRand):

 I've been working on rbm descriptors for building for ARM target, and I
 successfully built Tor's Firefox fork with rbm.  Caveats:

 * Code is very messy (e.g. commented out code everywhere), I need to clean
 it up a lot.
 * Still based on the ESR 52 version of Tor Browser; making ESR 60 work
 will mean figuring out how to get Rust to build (see next item).
 * The only rbm project I've tried to build is Firefox and its
 dependencies; it's unclear how much work will be involved in building the
 other projects (e.g. tor, the Go projects, and the Rust projects).
 * The workarounds for missing target libraries (i.e. using apt-get to
 download armhf packages and extracting them to a prefix directory) are
 kind of weird, maybe there's a simpler approach than what I did?
 * I want to generalize the cross-compiling stuff some more, so that in the
 future we could add aarch64, ppc64be, and ppc64le targets without code
 duplication.  Right now the cross-compiling stuff is hardcoded for armhf,
 which is great for a proof-of-concept but not a good idea to consider
 merging.
 * I haven't tested build reproducibility.  I don't expect any problems
 here, but it's too early to be confident.

 All that said, if anyone would like to play with it, the source code is at
 https://notabug.org/JeremyRand/tor-browser-build/src/armhf (it's in the
 armhf branch), and some random documentation is at
 https://wiki.raptorcs.com/wiki/Porting/Tor_Browser .  I've successfully
 run the resulting Firefox binary on my Asus C201 Chromebook (running
 Debian Stretch) and it works fine.

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Ticket URL: <https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12631#comment:18>
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