2009 Update

[ToyoRunner]

Marcel,

Glad to hear that your efforts are paying off. Thanks for all your hard work.

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 10:52 AM, Marcel Moolenaar <xcllnt at mac.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>
>
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