Re: [Valgrind-developers] SOLARIS / SPARC port

[John R. <jr...@Bi...>]

James Clause wrote:
> I know there's no official port for Solaris / SPARC but does anyone  
> know if there's at least a partial implementation somewhere?  There's  
> been a little bit of talk about it on various mailing lists but  
> nothing concrete.
> 
> If there's nothing available what would be the best way to start.  I  
> read that the suggested way to was to go from linux/x86 -> solaris/x86  
> ->solaris/SPARC is this still true.  And one final thing -- what would  
> be a decent estimate for how much work / how long the port would take  
> assuming decent knowledge of valgrind and the target platform?

Be aware of the direct commercial competition on Solaris SPARC,
such as Purify and Quantify from IBM [Rational], and Insure++ from Parasoft.
They do not cover every aspect of the valgrind milieu, but in many
environments they do the job very well.

There are two major areas of work: the operating system, and the hardware.
They are mostly separable, although they do overlap regarding the arguments
and results for system calls.  The path linux+x86 ==> solaris+x86 ==>
solaris+SPARC is nice because it gives an implementation for solaris+x86.
Using linux+SPARC as a middle would be useful, too, but perhaps the
audience is smaller.  Studying linux+PowerPC could be helpful because
both SPARC and PowerPC have fixed-length instructions.

Find a partner (or two, but not more.)  If you work together, and only on this
project, then it should take a couple of months to get memcheck running on
one small non-threaded C program.  A complete implementation, covering threads
and non-native execution, and all tools and all testcases and all opcodes and
all system calls, and with only a short list of bugs, might take three or four
times as long.

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