Advice about /usr/ports/math/gmp

[Tijl Coosemans]

On Fri, 3 Jan 2014 19:37:48 +0100 Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 03, 2014 at 07:27:29PM +0100, Dimitry Andric wrote:
>> On 03 Jan 2014, at 17:53, Torbjorn Granlund <tg at gmplib.org> wrote:
>>> We are about to release GMP 5.2.
>>> 
>>> We have been forced to add three FreeBSD-related items to the releases
>>> notes:
>>> 
>>>  * This release will not work on FreeBSD/amd64 7.x, 8.x or 9 series
>>>    before 9.3 with a Haswell CPU or any other CPU which supports the
>>>    BMI2 instructions.  The reason is that the FreeBSD m4 command is not
>>>    correctly implemented.  (Workaround: Use an older GMP release, or
>>>    install GNU m4 from /usr/ports and tell GMP to use it.)
>>> 
>>>  * This release will not work on FreeBSD/amd64 before version 10 using
>>>    the 32-bit ABI.  The reason is broken limits.h and broken dynamic
>>>    linking.  (Workaround: Use an older GMP release if using the 32-bit
>>>    ABI on these FreeBSD releases is important.)
>>> 
>>>  * This release will not work on FreeBSD/amd64 10.0 using the 32-bit
>>>    ABI.  The reason is bugs in the compiler 'clang'.  (Workaround:
>>>    Compiling gcc from /usr/ports might work, except that gcc depends on
>>>    GMP; we have not been able to test that workaround since
>>>    FreeBSD/i386 10.0 does not work for us under KVM or Xen.)
>>> 
>>> The first item is a show-stopper.  It would be possible to implement a
>>> workaround in GMP.  We choose not to do that since (1) we adviced the
>>> FreeBSD project two years ago the m4 bug, and FreeBSD chose to make 4
>>> releases without fixing m4, and (2) the fix is ugly, and (3) our use of
>>> m4 which triggers the bug is actually part of a workaround for a broken
>>> assembler (to much complexity to maintain workarounds for workarounds).
>>> 
>>> The second item should not affect /usr/ports builds since they would use
>>> the default 64-bit ABI on amd64 machines.
>>> 
>>> The third item is a show-stopper until clang is fixed.  We have not been
>>> able to isolate this problem due to lack of time and due to a deeply
>>> malfunctioning filesystem of FreeBSD/i386 under KVM and Xen+NetBSD.  We
>>> don't have any more information about these bugs.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> We do not plan to implement workarounds for the above bugs for GMP 5.2.x
>>> for any x.  I would advice that you stick with GMP 5.1.3.
>> 
>> Uhm, if you provide approximately zero information about these supposed
>> "bugs", how do you expect anyone to help fixing them?
> 
> In particular concerning m4, I'd like to hear what is buggy and how, our m4 do
> respect the m4 specs:
> http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/m4.html plus it has
> support for some (all?) of the gnu extension via the -g option.
> 
> If anything is buggy I would like to hear about it and fix.

The first item is http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=166994
The second item is about compiling with -m32.  We only fully implemented
that in FreeBSD 10.
The third item I don't know anything about.