Investigate broken Chromium/Firefox on latest Raspberry Pi OS #15
Description
While updating our Pi 1Bs (specifically they're labelled "2011.12") to the 2022-01-28 release of Raspberry Pi OS we found that neither Firefox nor Chromium.
For context: we weren't using the 2022-04-04 image as it was a) too big for the 4G SD cards we have and b) requires interactive setup we haven't yet worked around (see #9).
Our initial investigation (of Firefox) was of the "Illegal instruction" error that that yields, leading to https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?t=263051; though while that thread seems to conclude correctly that the architecture was the issue there isn't a resolution. None of the alternative browsers proved suitable (we tried those at https://www.fossmint.com/web-browsers-for-raspberry-pi/).
However it looks like the issue is that Raspberry Pi OS has moved to third party builds of Chromium & Firefox which no longer support the older Pis:
- [Buster] Chromium fails to start on ARMv6 RPi-Distro/chromium#25
- [Bullseye] Chromium fails to start on ARMv6 RPi-Distro/chromium#21
Surprisingly the error we got from Chromium wasn't the Illegal instruction error that those issues noted:
[0418/212042.610185:ERROR:elf_dynamic_array_reader.h(61)] tag not found
Trace/breakpoint trap
TODO:
- check more recent builds of Chromium (from the repos) in case they're fixed
- epiphany-browser (though I've a vague recollection that that didn't work for us previously)