Re: [Gcl-devel] Volunteering for Mac OS X port.

[Camm Maguire]

Greetings!  In short, you definitely can get this to work.  Details
follow: 

1) On some platforms, GCL relocates object modules natively, in most
   cases using the bfd library.  The advantages here are principally
   the ability to load objects, to a save-system, and find the modules
   again when restarting.  BFD support is currently available on i386,
   ppc, arm, m68k, s390 and sparc.  It is intended to extend this
   support universally eventually.

2) For very large images, such as acl2 when verifying *all* books,
   occasionally a relocation will require more than the 24bits
   available by default on ppc.  Other arches such as mips (16 bit
   relocs) have a -mlong-calls option to gcc to write all relocs as 32
   bits.  this will only be available on ppc with gcc-3.3

3) For platforms where bfd relocation is not available, or desirable,
   one can use GCL with dlopen (./configure --disable-statsysbfd
   --enable-dlopen).  No relocation overflow problems then appear, but
   one cannot build lisp packages in the conventional way with (load
   "foo.o")(save-system).  ACL2 uses this method by default.  For such
   cases, GCL provides its own function (compiler::link ...) (see info
   pages) to build a custom lisp image like acl2 without save-system.
   In the Debian acl2 package, this method is employed in debian/rules
   to extend acl2 support to all 11 Debian architectures.

4) So in sum, with gcc-3.3, adding -mlongcalls, all will work out of
   the box.  Before then, all will work if you use dlopen and
   (compiler::link).  Eventually, it might be nice to get support for
   this build option into the upstream acl2 makefiles.

Take care,


Omar El-Domeiri <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> Where can I find more information about the issues ACL2 has
> at this point.  I set out on this with hopes of having ACL2
> on my mac os x laptop. Also, What will need to be done once
> gcc 3.3 is here? will the problems just go away or will
> gcl need some minor revamping?
> 
> -Omar
> 
> On Sun, Feb 09, 2003 at 10:03:37PM -0500, Camm Maguire wrote:
> > Greetings!
> > 
> > Wonderful -- please keep us informed!  You may also want to look at
> > the linux-powerpc port files, which is used by the Debian ppc GCL
> > package.  On Debian, ppc is fully supported, with the exception that
> > we will be needing the upcoming -mlongcalls gcc compiler switch which
> > will be available here in the gcc 3.3 release.  Only a few large
> > object loads in ACL2 are known to be affected.
> > 
> > Take care,
> > 
> > Take care,
> > 
> > -- 
> > Camm Maguire                                                address@hidden
> > ==========================================================================
> > "The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah
> > 
> 
> 
> 
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> 

-- 
Camm Maguire                                            address@hidden
==========================================================================
"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah