[Vm-dev] Unix VM closure enabled?

[Andrew Gaylard]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 9:55 PM, Andreas Wacknitz<A.Wacknitz at gmx.de> wrote:
> I intend to create Solaris SPARC packages. Alas I have some problems with
> prerequisites at the moment. Libffi-3.0.8 has

Hi Andreas,

I have been building squeak on Solaris / SPARC for about 4 years now
for my own use.  I have a list of 8 patches that I've put together, as well
as a small script to apply them and run configure 'correctly'.

I agree with you about /opt; I use /opt/squeak as --prefix.

The main issue that I'm facing at the moment is that gcc-4.4.0 generates
code that causes unaligned accesses in fetchFloatAtinto; the same code
works in gcc-4.2.4 on SPARC.  Until I or someone else (hint!) fixes this,
I'm continuing to build with gcc-4.2.4.  But it does concern me that the VM
code shows bugs like this from time to time.  I suspect that some problems
remain hidden due to the fact that most users are using x86 (on whatever OS),
so alignment, long pointers, and endianness bugs are never encountered.

So building and testing the VM on a platform like SPARC  which enforces
alignment strictly, where pointers are/can be 64-bits, and which is big-endian,
will benefit the VM code.

Thanks for helping with this.
Andrew