Firefox Nightly is segfaulting (SIGSEGV) after most recent update; installing firefox-beta fixes it about nixpkgs-mozilla

[Artturin]

It's not a you problem, mozilla changed something.

NixOS/patchelf#520

[nbp]

Thanks for opening the issue.

The problem has been reported on matrix, investigated and solved by @K900 🎉 as part of #322 .

The issue was that Firefox changed the way firefox ELF (binary format) is updated at the end of the compilation. Firefox used to rely on a tool named elfhack which recently got replaced by relrhack. This change highlighted an issue in how Nixpkgs handles pre-compiled binaries.

In Nixpkgs, pre-compiled binaries are unlikely to work as they would not find the proper libraries nor the ELF interpreter. Thus a tool named patchelf is used to update the binary and let it know where the libraries it is loading are supposed to be.

With the analysis from @glandium, patchelf proved to be faulty, and @K900 provided a patch to fix the issue.

In the mean time, the firefox overlay applies this not-yet approved patch of patchelf as part of #322, with the goal of fixing firefox nightly and avoiding these SEGV. This should fix nightly builds after updating nixpkgs-mozilla repository.