Re: [Valgrind-users] [Summer of Code]Porting valgrind to NetBSD

[Nicholas N. <nj...@cs...>]

On Mon, 13 Jun 2005, Dennis Lubert wrote:

>> I would like to port the nice valgrind tools to NetBSD i386 platform as the 
>> Google Summer of Code project.  What are the issues that I should be 
>> careful with when I port valgrind to NetBSD?  Since there is a FreeBSD port 
>> for valgrind-stable-352, I would start with that, and make necessary 
>> changes to fit NetBSD.  Any comment/suggestion/feedback is highly 
>> appreciated.
>
> Wasnt the FreeBSD port of the 2.x version ? Maybe you should try to work 
> on the current 3.x svn tree, so the 3.x works on netbsd too. The 
> experiences you will make will probably be useful for porting it to 
> other BSDs or BSD derived systems. greets

The FreeBSD port was against an earlier version.  It should still be very 
instructive.

But things have changed quite a bit between 2.X and the pre-3.0 line, so 
as Dennis says working against the 3.0 line would make more sense.  It 
should be more amenable to OS ports than the 2.X line, but you should 
beware that it's still in flux -- things are currently being moved around 
a lot for modularisation reasons, so picking a current snapshot and 
working just from that (not updating) might be the best way to go.  Then, 
if you get it working well you could update for any changes.

Another thing:  3.0 supports both x86 and amd64.  Any new port will 
actually be an arch/OS pair, eg. x86-freebsd or amd64-freebsd, because 
there is some platform-specific code.  However, if you get one working it 
shouldn't be much more work to get the other working.

People have worked on other OS ports;  I know there are/have been Darwin,
Solaris and DragonflyBSD ports under development.  The authors of these 
might have suggestions or advice.

Finally, this is a nice goal to aim for, but I hope you have a pretty 
detailed knowledge of how NetBSD works, since Valgrind does lots of 
low-level OS interactions, and ports are definitely non-trivial -- much 
more so than for more normal programs.  (Doug Rabson, the FreeBSD porter, 
is a long-time FreeBSD kernel hacker, for example.)

Good luck!

Nick