[LLVMdev] A quick update on FreeBSD support

Marcel Moolenaar
Sat, 24 May 2008 18:43:11 -0000

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]

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...
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...

FYI,

--
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com