VM porting problems

Neil Rhodes neil-list at calliopeinc.com
Tue Dec 7 20:20:26 UTC 2004


I'm working on porting the 3.7 VM to Palm OS 6.0 (the 6.0 OS removes 
lots of restrictions in previous versions of the OS that make it 
difficult to support Squeak).

Here's the problem I'm having.  I've got a VM built which implements 
all the necessary io routines, including ioScreenSize, ioShowDisplay.  
The problem is that ioShowDisplay is never called.  Others are, like 
ioScreenSize.

One thing I tried to track down the problem was to build a VM for my 
Mac OS X machine.  My plan was to load the identical image and look at 
the bytecodes that were executed, figuring out where it started to 
differ from the Palm OS version.

I used the unix sources and successfully built a VM that contains only 
the MiscPrimitives internal plugin. Otherwise, there are no other 
plugins selected in VMMaker (internal or external). When I run the VM, 
it exhibits similar behavior. The image loads and starts executing. 
Some functions are called, like display_ioScreenSize, but 
display_ioShowDisplay is never called.

Any ideas what's going on?  I'm tending to think I'm missing a 
necessary plugin from both VMs.

Or, if I can get an idea what Smalltalk code is executed when an image 
is loaded, I can connect the Smalltalk code with the corresponding 
calls into the VM and figure out why the Smalltalk code doesn't every 
call ioShowDisplay.

Thanks,

Neil
--
Neil Rhodes
Palm OS Certified Developer
Co-author: Palm Programming: the Developer's Guide
Available for contract programming
neil at pobox.com 
    




More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list