Croquet VM issues

John M McIntosh johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com
Fri Mar 17 00:28:20 UTC 2006


On 16-Mar-06, at 2:10 PM, Andreas Raab wrote:

> Hi Folks -
>
> Since we're nearing release status I was going over the VM  
> requirements for Croquet to see if we could just go with a bunch of  
> standard VMs or whether we'd need some customized ones. Looking  
> over some recent VMMaker versions, it turns out that there are  
> actually a few important bits and pieces missing from the current  
> VMMaker release which we will want to use in Croquet.
>
> Most importantly, we need the following issues resolved:
>
> 1) GC improvements: As discussed in April last year
> (see http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-browse? 
> list=vm-dev&cmd=showmsg&msgnum=184)
> we need the weak array fixes and the GC measurements/tweaks that  
> John did. Those actually turn out to be important for us, if only  
> for analysis of current behavior.

> Questions:
> * What's the general status of those changes? The way I understand  
> the discussion we had back in april, is that John did the  
> adjustments to 64bit and then ... what?

These were folded into the VMMaker in mid may 2005, waiting feedback  
from others.


> * @Tim: Does a VMMaker repository exist by now? Like I was saying  
> back then, I am not alltogether happy with the current situation of  
> new releases just popping up on SqueakMap and with no way of seeing  
> what's in there and how things have developed.
>
> 2) Floating point accuracy: As discussed in november last year
> (see http://discuss.squeakfoundation.org/cgi-bin/ezmlm-browse? 
> list=vm-dev&cmd=showmsg&msgnum=365)
> we need consistent floating point behavior across platforms. I'm  
> actually in the process or rolling out a bunch of tests for it  
> which will be based on fdlibm as described in the above message.  
> One issue that is critical here is that I am planning to checksum  
> (SHA1) the VMs while we are running Croquet to see if the VM is  
> "compliant" (if not we'd run a whole suite of tests to verify the  
> behavior).

I did load that floating point lib and it works on the mac vm,  
waiting a decision from others...

>
> Questions:
> * On Mac and Unix, do we implement getSystemAttribute: -1 to return  
> the full path to the executable?
> * On Mac and Unix, can one read the executable while running  
> Squeak? I need this to checksum the VM proper.

Mmmm let me see, nope (-1) doesn't work, do you know if that works  
with unix?

You should be able to read the vm file, although you should consider  
at some point a vm could be marked as executable and not readable.

>
> 3) Some Socket fixes: David Reed made some changes for Sockets  
> which turn out to be critical in particular on Macs and Unix  
> systems. I'm still in the process of bundling up these changes but  
> they are fairly straightforward so I don't see many issues with them.

Well then share.

>
> Besides the above three, I have one additional question: What is  
> the general status of the 64bit work right now? Do we consider this  
> complete or work in progress or experimental? Can we rule out any  
> ill effects for the 32bit VMs?

? Ask Ian or Dan

>
> Thanks and Cheers,
>   - Andreas

--
======================================================================== 
===
John M. McIntosh <johnmci at smalltalkconsulting.com> 1-800-477-2659
Corporate Smalltalk Consulting Ltd.  http://www.smalltalkconsulting.com
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