[Vm-dev] Building StackVM with faster bitblt; problems, problems

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Fri Jun 21 23:06:13 UTC 2013


Now that the faster bitblt is working for the plain interpreter it is time to try to incorporate it into the StackVM on the Pi. Unfortunately, the StackVM still uses the old autoconf stuff to put together the makefiles. I'm not making a whole lot of sense out of what goes on and I really need some help.

 + I don't have the openGL developer stuff on my Pi and thus the B3DAcceleratorPlugin can't build. Perhaps I should load it but I'm rather inclined to think that the configure ought to test for the presence of the libraries and not make the plugin as appropriate. So far as I can tell the configure script *is* in fact checking for openGL and if I'm reading the config.log & confige.status files correctly has detected the absence (ac_cv_header_GL_gl_h=no is the relevant line). How are plugins excluded by the configure script tests? 

+ similarly for the SqueakSSLPlugin, except I can't spot 
+ sometime back in April I had to stop it making the mpeg3, klatt & croquet plugins and now I can't work out WTF I did to cause that. Sigh. What did I do?

+ how can I add the new files needed by the bitbltplugin? Configure does actually automatically add the .c files to the constructed bitbltplugin/Makefile but *not* the .s files

+ in a similar problem there is a .s file needed in the vm-display-x11 module; if I add it to the OBJS variable in the relevant makefile.in fragment, it appears in the generated makefile ok but I get a 'no rule to make foo' error. I thought unixy makefile stuff handled assembler files by default? If not, how do I get them built and where do I specify (or discover in the config?) that it should be using asasm?

+ I suspect it would be good practise to not even try to refer to the fast bitblt files unless the relevant switch was set in the configure. How do we do that?

While pointers to good doc explaining how to do this kind of thing would be nice, direct advice on the 'do this, do that, make' level would be ver y welcome. I'm not overly excited about trying to become expert at autoconf. With luck I'll never have to do anything other than ../configure' etc after this particular task.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: LJD: Lock Job on Disk




More information about the Vm-dev mailing list