[LLVMdev] A quick update on FreeBSD support

Bill Wendling
Sat, 24 May 2008 19:12:07 -0000

On May 24, 2008, at 11:43 AM, Marcel Moolenaar wrote:

> All,
>
> So far I've tried LLVM on amd64, i386, ia64 and powerpc under FreeBSD
> and aside for ia64, things look pretty good for a first try. There
> are 2 unexpected failures for PowerPC, which appear to be caused by
> uninitialized memory. I'm still working on a fix for that (need to
> brush up on my C++ skills).
>
> [sidenote: In FreeBSD -current, the memory allocator initializes
>  memory with 0xa5 to expose problems where allocated memory is not
>  properly initialized. This is disabled on the release branch. As
>  such, a stable  version of FreeBSD (i.e. any release) may not have
>  the 2 unexpected failures]
>
Hi Marcel,

Let us know if you would like extra eyes on the two PPC failures. Many
of us have a lot of experience with C++. :-) Do you know where these
allocations are?

> Results are:
> 	amd64 & i386:
> 	# of expected passes		2463
> 	# of expected failures		6
>
> 	ia64:
> 	# of expected passes		2440
> 	# of unexpected failures	21
> 	# of expected failures		7
>
> 	powerpc:
> 	# of expected passes		2461
> 	# of unexpected failures	2
> 	# of expected failures		6
>
> My current plan is as follows:
> o  Resolve powerpc failures to bring it in line with amd64 & i386.
> o  Adding support for inline assembly for ia64 (already started) and
>    improving ia64 in general. This is longer term work...

Is the lack of inline assembly the cause of the 21 regressions on
ia64? Or is it something more systemic?

> o  Add ARM and sparc64 to the mix (and MIPS when I have the hardware).
> o  Extend the testing to include:
>    -  the testsuite,
>    -  the complete FreeBSD source tree (kernel + userland)
>    -  the FreeBSD ports collection (~20000 software projects),
>       including biggies like X11, KDE, OpenOffice, Java...
>
> The end-result of this exercise hopefully a compiler that can
> replace GCC as the "system" compiler. Your comments and/or
> suggestions are always welcome...
>
This is great work! Thank you!

-bw