[Vm-dev] how can I build a sista spur 64 vm?

Clément Béra bera.clement at gmail.com
Tue Mar 24 17:58:37 UTC 2020


Hi Robert,

I worked on sista and I don't think I have ever tried it on 64 bits. I run
my experiments on x86. My expectation for 64 bits is that you have to write
build files inspired from the 32 bits
sista.spur and the 64 bits cog.spur files. Then you have to run it in the
VM simulator and fix the various few problems you see (likely a few
instructions are not implemented in the
x64 back-end). Then you can build a system. It's not so much work.

There was a released alpha version of Sista [1], which I used to run the
benchmark of a research paper [2]. If you compile a VM with sources from
that time (recent sources have difference
that will break it), and follow the guidelines from the blog post [1], you
should be able to reproduce the benchmark results from the paper.

As I remember it, most benchmarks run without crashes at 1.5x and the
development tools could be run for a while without crashes. Debugging and
on-the-fly code changes in sista are
only partially implemented (there's the potential to do it, but one has to
implement it). I would say it is currently in a similar state as the
strongtalk VM [3], while being compatible with
Squeak and other Cog clients.

I don't know what you mean by operational. If you're looking to experiment
with it, tweak it to run some benchmarks, then you should be able to do it.
If you're looking to deploy an application
on a production VM, then significant work is left to do so (discuss
directly with Eliot if that is the case).

Have fun with the project :-)

[1] https://clementbera.wordpress.com/2017/07/19/sista-open-alpha-release/
[2] https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01596321/
[3] http://strongtalk.org/

On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 3:43 PM Robert <robert.withers at pm.me> wrote:

>
> I understand that Sista is operational. I would like to try. How can I
> build a Sista vm? I went to linux64x64/squeak.sista.spur and there is a
> file there NotYetImplemented.
>
> I appreciate any guidance.
>
> --
> Kindly,
> Robert
>
>
>

-- 
Clément Béra
https://clementbera.github.io/
https://clementbera.wordpress.com/
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