Security Insights

Technical Quickie: Building SpiderMonkey On FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64

Technical Quickie: Building SpiderMonkey On FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64
I wanted to get Didier Stevens modified SpiderMonkey Javascript engine compiled and running on a FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64 box. It turns out the config files shipped with his 1.7.0 version do not include FreeBSD support, so I wound up having to hack something together...and I thought I would share what I did in case others are interested. I assume these instructions would be relatively applicable to later FreeBSD versions as well.

When you go to build the source, config.mk pulls in an appropriate file in config/ to use for your system. On FreeBSD 6.2 AMD64, the output of 'uname –s' and 'uname –r' essentially lead to the config file named 'config/FreeBSD6.2-RELEASE.mk'. So what I wound up doing was go into the config/ directory and copy the 'Linux-All.mk' file to 'FreeBSD6.2-RELEASE.mk'.

If we were building on an x86 (32-bit) FreeBSD platform, that might be all we need to do. However, since we're building on AMD64 (64-bit), this configuration file needs to be modified because the default Linux configuration file references 64-bit CPU architecture as 'x86_64'; on FreeBSD AMD64, the CPU architecture is reported as 'amd64'. Fortunately the fix is simple: just do a find/replace on all values of 'x86_64' and change them to 'amd64'. There are three changes total.

Now that you've made those changes, you should be all set. Just build the application ("gmake –f Makefile.ref") and then grab the 'js' binary out of the 'FreeBSD6.2-RELEASE_DBG.OBJ/' directory.

Enjoy.

- Jeff

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