[Vm-dev] Re: [squeak-dev] Using FFI on MacOSX

[Nicolas Cellier]

2010/7/21 Mariano Martinez Peck <marianopeck at gmail.com>:
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> On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 10:22 PM, Nicolas Cellier <nicolas.cellier.aka.nice at gmail.com> wrote:
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>> Its not obvious for a Mac newbie like me to get FFI running on MacOSX.
>> What I (re?) discovered is below. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
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>> To vm maintainers : wouldn't it be a good idea to pass the flag ffiLoad to ioLoadModule() instead of relying only on a single global variable whether it is a plugin that is requested or not ?
>> This way we could have both secured/fast plugin loading and opened FFI (if distributed in the bundle). Unless there are other reasons unknown of me...
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> Nicolas, for SqueakDBX, I had to write this:
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> http://www.squeakdbx.org/Compiling%20and%20installing%20OpenDBX
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> where it says "Problems with Mac OS"
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> And yes, I agree it would be great to have the correct behavior by default. Hope John can do that.
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> Mariano
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Yes, that would be great.
The idea would be to just look in a reduced set of directories for
plugins but let Alien/FFI scan more...
One solution is to pass the flag ffiLoad to ioLoadModule()...

Nicolas

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>> Nicolas
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>> -----------------------------------------------------
>> Ah, some news!
>> In order to track and debug the problem with FFI, I built a VM.
>> (uneasy because latest svn xcodeproj is not exactly configured for a one click build...).
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>> The problem is that most vm are configured to search for plugin only in squeak bundle
>> (global variable gSqueakPluginsBuiltInOrLocalOnly in files sqMain.c and sqMacUnixExternalPrims.c)
>> I guess this is to save time at startup (and batteries for iPhone...)
>> And also to get some more secure VM (can't load an invalid plugin from an older squeak vm).
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>> Unfortunately, no difference is made between loading a squeak plugin and loading a FFI library...
>> There is a ffiLoad flag passed to findAndLoadModule() in sqNamedPrims.c
>> but not to subfunction ioLoadModule() in sqMacUnixExternalPrims.c... (a mistake IMHO)
>> So this setting is preventing FFI to work.
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>> What you should do is change this setting:
>> - select your squeak vm in the finder.
>> - Then choose a menu item like "display package content" (it's a guess, my version is configured in french).
>> - Then edit the contents/info.plist with a property editor.
>> - Then uncheck the box corresponding to SqueakPluginsBuiltInOrLocalOnly and save properties
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>> Then FFI should be operational again...
>> (But Smallapack may well crash, at least that's what happens here...)
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>> I think I will CC squeak-dev/vm-dev to check If I this is the expected solution.
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>> Nicolas
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