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