[Vm-dev] Re: [squeak-dev] Cog VM on older architecture ?

Eliot Miranda eliot.miranda at gmail.com
Tue Oct 14 11:17:29 UTC 2014


Hi Stéphane,

On Oct 14, 2014, at 12:25 AM, Stéphane Rollandin <lecteur at zogotounga.net> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I got hold of an old laptop on Pentium II. I installed Windows XP in it and tried to run Squeak to see how it goes, but my attempts with various Cog VM all failed (with a message from the system, not a VM crash). The interpreter VM worked fine (but it's slooow).

I'd love to see the message, but I'm guessing it is that the Pentium II doesn't have SSE2 instructions.

The solution would be fir you to build your own Cog VM not using the -sse2 flag.  The JIT tests for the availability of SSE2 instructions and if available generates machine code floating point primitives.  But the C compiler can't choose dynamically.  So your hand rolled VM will have poorer floating point performance but otherwise should be good.


> Is it expected ?

Yes. Pentium II has MMX, not SSE2.


> Stef


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