[Vm-dev] Fwd: [Pkg-squeak-devel] Bug#567366: `memoryAllocate' implicitly converted to pointer

[David T. Lewis]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 09:03:44PM +0100, Jos? L. Redrejo Rodr?guez wrote:
>  
> El jue, 28-01-2010 a las 14:43 -0500, David T. Lewis escribi??:
> > This is somebody trying to build an Mpeg plugin on a 64 bit machine.
> > It will not work. The set of plugins that are currently safe to use
> > on 64 bit platforms is much smaller than the set of plugins that appear
> > in the generated sources in platforms/unix/src.
> > 
> > Bottom line: Don't do that. If you need the full range of plugins, you
> > must compile in 32 bit mode and load the appropriate 32 bit libraries.
> > 
> > Unless someone speaks up to say otherwise, there is currently no
> > supported Unix VM for 64 bit Unix/Linux platforms. John is working
> > on providing supported 64 bit VMs for OS X, although I can't say
> > whether he has looked at the Mpeg plugin or not (I definely have not
> > done so).
> 
> Hi, is there any list of the plugins that are currently safe to use in
> 64 bits platforms? I'll disable in the package the rest for all the
> architectures excepting i386.

There is not an official list. Here are the plugins that I usually
build on my personal system (AMD 64, SuSE):

  BalloonEnginePlugin
  BitBltSimulation
  FilePlugin
  SocketPlugin
  UnixAioPlugin
  UnixOSProcessPlugin
  XDisplayControlPlugin
  LargeIntegersPlugin
  (*) SoundPlugin
  (*) AsynchFilePlugin
  (*) FileCopyPlugin
  (*) FFIPlugin

(*) These last four require patches (see Mantis) that have not yet
been included in the Subversion sources.

I do think that you should be *very* cautious about distributing a VM
compiled for -m64 on a mainstream Linux distribution. If it was just
for server applications it would be fine, but many Linux users will
want to run Etoys or Squeak with multimedia, and for this they need
a supported 32-bit VM. They will be very disappointed if they try to
run Squeak and the VM crashes, or if part of the system does not work
because of missing plugins.

Dave