Re: [Sablevm-developer] Porting sablevm to powerpc

[Etienne M. G. <eti...@uq...>]

Hi Mark.

Grzegorz told me he would be away from his email for a few days, (I
should be too, very soon), so I will reply to your message, as I think
this reply might benefit other potential porters..

On Thu, Aug 15, 2002 at 10:43:05PM +0200, Mark Wielaard wrote:
> Impressive! I am very interested in a VM that uses GNU Classpath and
> that I can use on powerpc (Debian GNU/Linux system).
> What 25 lines of code do I have to look at?

You have to look at the following files:

src/libsablevm/include/jni_system_specific.h
src/libsablevm/system.h
src/libsablevm/system.c

The easiest would be to forget about inline-threaded engine for now.
It should take me at most a few minutes to fix it on the powerpc, once
the remaining is in place; I have to add calls to _svmf_iflush in
_svmf_get_sequence. _svmf_iflush already has a draft implementation
for powerpc.  I have already setup the configure.ac stuff to select
the direct-threaded engine by default for non i*86-*-gnu systems.

The single most difficult part of porting SableVM to a new system, is
implementing the _svmh_compare_and_swap function, which ***MUST*** be
an *ATOMIC* operation.

[Note: You also have to worry about the _svmf_iflush stuff when you
want to run the inline-threaded engine on processors with distinct
instruction and data caches.]

I hope this helps.

Etienne
-- 
Etienne M. Gagnon                    http://www.info.uqam.ca/~egagnon/
SableVM:                                       http://www.sablevm.org/
SableCC:                                       http://www.sablecc.org/