[Sablevm-developer] Status question(s)

[Grzegorz P. <gr...@se...>]

Hi!

A couple of questions of "where are we" kind...

1. I have seen some PowerPC patches on this list.
I even can find some PowerPC bits of this kind:

static inline void
_svmf_iflush (_svmt_word *pword)
{
#if   defined(__powerpc__)

  __asm__ __volatile__ ("dcbst 0,%0; sync; icbi 0,%0; isync"::"r"
(pword));

#elif defined(__i386__)
  /* do nothing */
#else
#error
#endif
}

Questions:
What stops us from getting PowerPC port ready?
What about other arches?
Which ones should we handle here, in _svmf_iflush (spparently)?
Which ones surely don't need this special treatment?

2. There are still problems w/ -native build-depending on
itself. It's very annoying especially while porting to new arches
(bdale was extremly helpful here, as he first installed "bad" -native,
then I rebuilded -native and he installed "good" version).
Not to mention auto-builders which won't be able to build the
package for the first time on new architecture.

Questions:
Any ideas how to fix it?
Etienne - do you have plans to remove this issue?
If yes - when can it be expected to happen?

3. I was looking at all the special, architecture-dependant
stuff in sablevm (at those "bits" I'd better say).

It seems that almost all of this could be fully automated,
so that we didn't need to do anything or almost anything to
build it on any new Linux port. Test program I attached is one of
two approches, first which I _have_ done - was to use ./configure
script to detect right types for our sizes of data.

Questions:
Do you think is it worth the effort?
Are the architectures expected to differ in some other manners
which would make this "automation" unneeded?

4. What will be needed to get this "faster" threading engine
working on non-i386 arches? (where should I start?)

Best reagards

					Grzegorz B. Prokopski