[Vm-dev] Unix VM closure enabled?

[Andreas Wacknitz]

Am 18.07.2009 um 00:40 schrieb David T. Lewis:

>
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 09:55:09PM +0200, Andreas Wacknitz wrote:
>>
>> Am 17.07.2009 um 18:46 schrieb Bert Freudenberg:
>>>
>>> There are very few non-Linux Unix users in the Squeak community. If
>>> someone would step forward to maintain a Solaris or *BSD or whatever
>>> unixy VM binary they would be welcome. Until then, everyone who
>>> needs it compiles their
>> I intend to create Solaris SPARC packages. Alas I have some problems
>> with prerequisites at the moment. Libffi-3.0.8 has
>>  expected passes: 1049
>>  unexpected failures: 285
>>  unsupported tests: 15
>> I want to find out how to reduce the amount of failures (if  
>> possible).
>
> I don't know if SPARC is a 64 bit platform these days (i.e. 64 bit
SPARC v9 is 64 bit. My printed SPARC v9 spec is from 1994.
In Solaris usually the kernel is 64 bit, libraries are available in 32  
and 64 bit
(64 bit in a sparcv9 sub directory) and most applications in 32 bit.
As long as an application doesn't need a 64 bit address space there is  
no
need to have it 64 bit because unlike x86 / x64 you won't gain speed  
improvements
in 64. The prerequisites I mentioned are available in both depths (gmp  
and mpfr passing
all checks). Only libffi has many failing checks at the moment.
My plan is to create a working squeak VM first and then care for some  
improvements on
libffi and one or two packages. At the moment I am using Sun's GCC4SS  
as it generated
faster executables but it will make it necessary to at least install  
the appropriate run time
libraries. So I also consider to create a version that only depends on  
the system supplied
gcc-3.4.3.

> C pointers by default), but if so please note that the 64 bit FFI  
> changes
> have not yet been merged, see http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7237
Thanks for the pointer. I son't know yet whether it will be necessary  
to create a 64 bit
version. It seems as if most people are still satisfied with 32 bit  
and on SPARC this will
be faster.

>
>> Of course I am also waiting for the closure changes appearing in the
>> UNIX sources...
>
> No need to wait, all of the necessary changes are already in the  
> VMMaker
> package. There is no unix-specific code involved.
>
I still don't have experiences with VMMaker. It's a little bit  
confusing to have
sources on squeakvm.org and also VMMaker. I will try it out as soon as  
I have
a running squeak on Solaris...

Regards
Andreas