Re: Problems on Irix 6.3: libffi won't work

[Marcus G. Daniels]

>>>>> "B" == Benedikt Stefansson <address@hidden> writes:

B> There is a mention in the Makefile.conf that libffi died in Irix
B> 5.3 when Marcus created the binary for that version - please,
B> please Marcus: what was the remedy?

Use the ffcall library.  ffcall is a more complete callin/callout library,
but we aren't using it except when necessary because it isn't LGPLed.

And unfortunately, I haven't yet had either a sufficiently precise
report of anything specific that is broken, or a report of success on
Irix 6, so I can't really say what the status of Swarm on Irix 6 is --
and I don't have an account on any Irix 6.[234] machines.

To use ffcall, you to add -DAVCALL to your CFLAGS and link against -lavcall.
Look at mgd-SFI-Solaris for an example.  There's a "ifeq (1,0)" that 
delimits the ffcall and libffi dependencies.

ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/gnu/ffcall-1.3.1.tar.gz

Supposedly, ffcall works at least with the native compiler on Irix 6.2
(see the PLATFORMS file in the ffcall-1.3.1/avcall subdirectory).

B> And no, I can't use the binary
B> version since the toolchain (beginning with GCC 2.8.1) is all
B> dependent on the n32 binaries but the Irix5.3 binary is o32.

I once had temporary access to a Irix 6.4 machine, and I tried to make
a binary distribution.  Unfortunately, I ran in incremental linking
problems, and was unable to make one in the amount of time I had
access to that machine.  The archive install worked fine, though.  
This was before libffi/ffcall, though.

I also have reason to think there are significant differences between
Irix 6.2 and Irix 6.4 when it comes to linker and assembler particulars.

In summary, the knowledge we have about Irix 6 and Swarm is poor, and
it would be great if someone would make the effort to help improve
this knowledge.  One way to do this is to improve the portability of
the libffi and ffcall packages, another way is to provide us with the
resources so that we can do it.

If Swarm works on a platform for which there isn't already a binary
distribution, that's lucky.


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