Discussion:
[fpc-devel] FreeBSD PowerPC64 Port
Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
2021-04-17 22:45:44 UTC
Permalink
Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?

I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC. Any
assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.
Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel
2021-04-18 09:40:51 UTC
Permalink
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?
I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC. Any assistance would be appreciated.
Interest in FreeBSD is apparently very little in the last years within the FPC universe, considering the half backend support even for x86-64. Even more after the main FPC FreeBSD port contributor Marco switched years ago to windows.

But if you have questions on certain points regarding FPC, I am pretty sure somebody can answer you them here.

_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-***@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.fre
Marco van de Voort via fpc-devel
2021-04-19 12:22:26 UTC
Permalink
Post by Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?
I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC. Any assistance would be appreciated.
Interest in FreeBSD is apparently very little in the last years within the FPC universe, considering the half backend support even for x86-64.
Half backend support? Did you mean _LLVM_ backend support? There is
none, save some work I did in Berlin.
Post by Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel
Even more after the main FPC FreeBSD port contributor Marco switched years ago to windows.
No, it was my remote shell account changing from FreeBSD on own hosted
systems to a linux account on a commercial shared server. I mostly
booted own systems under Windows since I left college (which,
admittedly, in my case was fairly late)

But the real kicker was the LLVM migration that necessitates things in
startup that I'm not capable off. Even less so with toolchains that
randomly seem to drop sections instead of reporting an error.

I'm told that with FreeBSD13, the last lifeline, ld.bfd will be gone,
and the last somewhat workable version(11) goes out of support in September.

If somebody can provide a base system (iow simple binaries and simple
libc linked binaries) working on LLVM basis,  it should be easy to pick
it up again though. Even with the old port, people often helped me with
the startup code (Pierre with 64-bit, Florian and Jonas with 32-bit PIC
iirc)


_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-***@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.or
Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel
2021-04-19 16:52:07 UTC
Permalink
Post by Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?
I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC. Any assistance would be appreciated.
Interest in FreeBSD is apparently very little in the last years within the FPC universe, considering the half backend support even for x86-64.
Half backend support? Did you mean _LLVM_ backend support? There is none, save some work I did in Berlin.
I meant baked, sorry.
Post by Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel
Even more after the main FPC FreeBSD port contributor Marco switched years ago to windows.
No, it was my remote shell account changing from FreeBSD on own hosted systems to a linux account on a commercial shared server. I mostly booted own systems under Windows since I left college (which, admittedly, in my case was fairly late)
But the real kicker was the LLVM migration that necessitates things in startup that I'm not capable off.
Startup code, in particular was we use pascal ones now is normally not a problem ;)
Even less so with toolchains that randomly seem to drop sections instead of reporting an error.
I'm told that with FreeBSD13, the last lifeline, ld.bfd will be gone, and the last somewhat workable version(11) goes out of support in September.
IIRC, lld simply crashed with FPC linker files, so I think this was the reason why I gave up on it.

_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-***@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mail
Sven Barth via fpc-devel
2021-04-18 10:54:27 UTC
Permalink
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?
I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC.  Any
assistance would be appreciated.
You can orient yourself at the changes done to port FPC to
aarch64-freebsd in revision 49157.

Regards,
Sven
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-***@lists.freepascal.org
https://lis
Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
2021-04-19 11:28:52 UTC
Permalink
Thanks for reaching back. I’d the feeling that there wasn’t much interest
when I didn’t get a lot of feedback from the FreeBSD/PowerPC community.

I’ve looked at the changes to support aarch64. I’ve already gotten things
to a point where I can build a cross compiler for FreeBSD PowerPC. But l’m
struggling with the start up code, as I’m lost when it comes to coding in
assembly.

This may be a lost cause.
Post by Sven Barth via fpc-devel
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?
I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC. Any
assistance would be appreciated.
You can orient yourself at the changes done to port FPC to
aarch64-freebsd in revision 49157.
Regards,
Sven
Karoly Balogh via fpc-devel
2021-04-19 11:52:46 UTC
Permalink
Hi
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
Thanks for reaching back. I’d the feeling that there wasn’t much
interest when I didn’t get a lot of feedback from the FreeBSD/PowerPC
community.
I’ve looked at the changes to support aarch64.  I’ve already gotten
things to a point where I can build a cross compiler for FreeBSD
PowerPC.
Are your changes available somewhere in form of a patch?
Post by Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel
But l’m struggling with the start up code, as I’m lost when it comes to
coding in assembly.
This may be a lost cause.
It never is, some of us are really interested to add ports, especially in
case where it's BSD, where the system is already supported, one only needs
to add another CPU, write some startup code, and maybe tidy up some stuff
here and there.

Do you have a box available for testing which is reachable remotely for
testing/running the compiler? I'm happy to help, but setting up
development enviroments especially for relatively rare systems on older
Macs is not always easy. And/or some QEMU/other emulator setup including a
disk image + documentation on how to get it running which one can just
download and start working?

I have an older PowerMac, but honestly, I don't want to spend several days
trying to get FreeBSD running on it and figuring out the basics, just to
finally be able to start working on FPC, although if you can provide a
disk image which can be used to boot a physical Mac without fiddling with
the installer, that could work too. Ideally something which boots on a
PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet or Quicksilver with an ATI Radeon 9000 or an
ATI Rage 128.

Cheers,
--
Charlie
Jonas Maebe via fpc-devel
2021-04-19 18:38:59 UTC
Permalink
Post by Karoly Balogh via fpc-devel
I have an older PowerMac, but honestly, I don't want to spend several days
trying to get FreeBSD running on it
It's for PPC64LE. I think not even PowerMac G5s are supported by it.


Jonas
_______________________________________________
fpc-devel maillist - fpc-***@lists.freepascal.org
https://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/lis

Loading...