Am 03.04.15 11:13, schrieb Esteban Lorenzano:
On 02 Apr 2015, at 19:20, Eliot Miranda <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Andreas,
sorry to be late in replying. This has been a busy month (I
moved house).
On Sat, Mar 14, 2015 at 10:33 AM, Andreas Wacknitz <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Eliot,
Am 11.03.2015 um 23:15 schrieb Eliot Miranda
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>:
HI Andreas,
On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 9:55 AM, Andreas Wacknitz
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hi Clement,
Am 11.03.2015 um 09:23 schrieb Clément Bera
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>:
Hello,
About the FreeBSD VM, Holger Freyther worked on it so he's
the best person to answer. I think some people used it and
it was at least partially working.
That’s my impression. The VMMaker contains some FreeBSD
classes but I have the impression that they are not complete
(and probably outdated).
About your NativeBoost bug on openSolaris, need more
information:
- Can you confirm that you use an intel processor on your
openSolaris machine ? I assume that yes but I ask because
solaris were typically running on other processors.
NativeBoost, as of today, works only with intel processor.
Yes, my Sun Ultra 24 is an Intel based Workstation (Q9300).
- Do you build the Cog VM or Stack VM ? I mean PharoVMBuild
or PharoSVMBuild ? I think the PharoSVMBuild does not
include NativeBoost by default, that may be your problem.
There's a fix somewhere...
PharoVM from "branch 'master' of
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm"; (thus Cog VM).
I would like to fold back any changes into the svn master
repository for Cog. What are the diffs? (If you have time to
send me the diffs that would save me a lot of time).
I don’t know whether there is much to harvest from what I did. As
far as I remember most of my work was hacking the generator image
created by the pharo vm scripts (for my Mac) in order to make
the resulting C code to compile under openindiana. The basis for
Solaris was already there (and as far as I can see it is also in
the Squeak VM sources). I only tweaked some definitions and includes.
I will look at my notes tomorrow and will post if I will find
something relevant.
I am curios about the future of the PharoVM. The main development
of the VM seem to happen in the SqueakVM (by you). Getting the
Spur changes into the PharoVM seem to be a lot of work.
Note that this will happen (or is already happening). Esteban is
working on building the Spur version of Pharo, so he is doing this
work. But actually it *isn't* that much work. There is basically a
trio of new memory management files for each platform, e.g.
platforms/unix/vm/sqUnixSpurMemory.c, and a new source tree for the
spur vm, spursrc/vm. The system is already set up to build multiple
VMs (at least the svn tree is).
Yes, this is already done. We are building spur VMs and images since
awhile now. You can find all the related jobs here:
https://ci.inria.fr/pharo/view/4.0-VM-Spur/
If I follow this link and what is being used there brings me to the
ordinary PharoVm project on github:
https://github.com/pharo-project/pharo-vm
There are three branches: master, develop and spur64. Which one is being
used to build PharoVM-spur32?
And as Eliot says… is not *much* work… except when it is :)
In fact, we were planning to release Pharo 4 (next week) with a Spur
VM, but we didn’t finish all the small things around. So we will
release next July (or around) a Pharo 4S (S, for Spur) with “official”
spur support. We do not want to stay to much time in older versions.
Also, our development process is different
This explanation irritates me: Pharo 4 will be released soon with a Spur
VM? And then around summer Pharo 4S? Isn't it a contradiction?
than squeak, AFAIK… we drop backward compatibility in a regular basis.
Which basically means we will move to spur and we will drop support
for older versions.
That's OK, but I am still, hmm say confused, because Eliot is changing A
LOT (just look at what has been released during the last days), but
PharoVM hasn't been
changed for some days (I am following the master branch closely). So
there is a rapid development in the Cog branch of the SqueakVM. The
changes in the PharoVM are much slower (at least as I recognise it).
I have more questions but I am reluctant to disturb you further as you
must be quite busy atm.
Best regards
Andreas
Wouldn’t it be better to move back the changes of the PharoVM
into the SqueakVM and have a united development?
Well, I don't think the Pharo community will be willing to move to
svn. SOme time I may be able to move to git. But yes, I *would*
like to see important fixes merged back into the SqueakVM. I think
this is very important. I'm too overloaded to look at the pharovm so
I'm dependent on those working on the pharovm in giut to send me
changes for integration.
Right, we are happy with our process and I do not see it fitting with
svn. We changed a lot of “organisational” stuff to ensure traceability
and “buildability” (if such word exists…). And we have made a lot of
progress in that area using git and github infrastructure at a point
most of the time to incorporate a change we just accept a pull request.
To be able to do that:
- we have to be sure what version of each component (vm, plugin,
platform source) is part of the commit info. That’s why we keep
together both platform sources and image sources (using filetree
monticello format). That way each commit has everything we need to
build the new vm. In fact… I have a script “./newVM <commit>” that
does a clone, prepares an image, generates sources and builds the vm…
then I can test if a pull request is valid. But most of the time that
is not needed, because:
- for each pull request, we fire a travis job that creates a vm from
scratch and then runs all tests we have in Pharo (and we have improved
a lot in that area latest years). They are not “vm specific tests”,
but since they tests all the system, if vm does not crashes and tests
are run, we can be sure is working (this wouldn’t be possible without
right traceability).
- we also build the vm using CMake, but not directly, we use
CMakeMaker which allow us to define the build in smalltalk.
- finally, we would like to use the other capabilities (for
documentation, etc.) we gain for free by using github. Not that we are
already using it… but we would like, in the future.
Is there an up-to-date documentation of the processes? Especially if I
want to add more platform support (like openindiana or FreeBSD)?
My time is very limited (my day job is quite different from what I do in
my spare time + my family and my house also need a lot attention + next
to my Smalltalk interets I am also interested in operating systems) so
my reaction time is sometimes quite slow :)
So… obviously all of this can be achieved without using git and
github… but there the infrastructure is already done.
Said that. Even if we actually have a different process, we (Myself,
particularly) are trying to reduce the gap between both VMs. And right
now this is the status:
- in the VM itself there is almost no change. AFAIR, just two small
things:
a) I include setjmp.h somewhere, because compiler was asking for it
(We use different versions than Eliot)
b) the macro to read the image is changed, because we needed to change
it for allow build an iOS image. This is just one line in the image
and the addition of one macro in 4 platform sources (Linux, Win and
Mac redirects to old macro, but iOS implements something different)
- In the platforms we have the most important difference, because we
deprecated the “Mac OS” branch in favor of “iOS”, which in fact should
be called OSX, because is the Cocoa version. I understand Eliot want
to go in that direction soon so we will align in that area too (btw,
that branch has growth organically so we'll need to do some
reorganisation to clarify it, eventually)
- in the plugins, we try to adopt a different approach than the
previous one: instead using particularities of the platform, we want
to align sources as much as possible, so we use the posix libraries.
Again, that’s just when is possible (and when we have time). The most
important change we produced here is with FilePlugin: we changed it to
provide posix-permissions (and soon we will add primitives to retrieve
also ownership). To allow that, we changed a lot in the windows
version of the plugin, because instead windows functions we use MinGW.
We would like to see this changes merged.
After that, I think there will be some other minor changes… not many,
and most probably we can remove those differences.
hope this clarify all :)
That's a nice explanation at least.
But I am still confused. Especially because you didn't mention
NativeBoost :)
The ffi area also seem to be different and i a flux.
And still: How to integrate more platforms?
Regards
Andreas
