2009 Update

[Marcel Moolenaar]

All,

Anton Shterenlikht reported various problems when he tried ia64
and I'm pleased to announce some updates:

1.  The kernel panic relating to inconsistent high FP registers
     has been fixed. This also means that the following message
     will not appear on the console anymore:
	XXX: bogusly disabled high FP regs

     Versions fixed: 9-CURRENT
     Fix will be merged to 8-STABLE after 8.0-RELEASE

2.  The failures in perl when threading has been enabled have
     been identified as a compiler bug relating to the use of
     statements in expressions. In other words, the expressions
     of the form:
	({ ... })

     All test failures were eliminated when these were recoded
     as proper inline functions. The perl port has not been
     fixed at this time. A definite confidence booster for the
     threading support on ia64 and yet another nail in GCC's
     coffin.

3.  I'm working on getting KDE 4 to build again. It's currently
     failing in optional packages. The base KDE 4 infrastructure
     is up and running and Konqueror (the web browser) seems to
     work quite well, though tends to dump core after a while.
     It would be looked into.

4.  GNOME built and ran fine before, but it's possible that
     things have changed. I'll keep playing with it.

Future work:

1.  I got a VNC server for ia64 building and running, but I can't
     reproduce it at this time, so no fixes for the ports yet. With
     a VNC server, a whole set of new programs can be ported and
     tested better.

2.  I'm planning to change PAGE_SIZE to 16K instead of 8K. It be
     good for performance. More on this later.

3.  More compiler and debugger work. GCC is really not good for
     ia64. I'm planning on refocusing some of my attention towards
     compiler work. Related to this is the debugger. GDB is not
     lacking severely on ia64. Note that I don't plan to fix GDB.
     Neither will I fix GCC. I'll be looking elsewhere.

Overall good news. However, the state of GCC and GDB for ia64 is
still a big problem in my opinion.

FYI,

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
xcllnt at mac.com