Bug#1148038: webkit2gtk: WebKitGTK no longer supports big-endian architectures

[Alberto Garcia]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 04:59:01PM +0000, Pranav P wrote:
> I am Pranav and I work in IBM as a Linux Developer on the s390x
> platform.
> 
> Is bringing Skia to big-endian platforms a technically feasible
> option for WebKitGTK?
> 
> I would be interested in helping investigate this from the s390x
> side.

Hello,

the situation to the best of my knowledge is the following:

- Skia is developed by Google and they don't support big-endian.

- Skia doesn't make releases. WebKitGTK keeps an in-tree copy (under
  Source/ThirdParty/skia) and updates it every few weeks.

- Any attempt to support big-endian platforms would need to happen in
  the Google repo (ideal, but unlikely).

- The second best alternative would be to patch Skia in the WebKit
  repo, but given that Skia is updated frequently someone would have
  to maintain those patches. That's what happens in other projects
  (see [1] for example), but the WebKitGTK team doesn't have the
  resources to do that at the moment.

In Debian we carry some small downstream patches to make WebKitGTK
build in some architectures, but I don't think this is feasible in
this case because of what I just said.

However, if IBM is serious about supporting s390x in WebKitGTK I would
recommend to discuss it with the team in the webkit-gtk mailing list:

   https://lists.webkit.org/mailman3/lists/webkit-gtk.lists.webkit.org/

Regards,

Berto

[1] https://github.com/zeldin/chromium_be/blob/master/chromium-146.0.7680.177/skia.patch