Date: Mon, 07 Jan 2008 22:30:18 -0500 From: "Alexandre \"Sunny\" Kovalenko" <alex.kovalenko@verizon.net> To: Andrew Reilly <andrew-freebsd@areilly.bpc-users.org> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org, Jason Evans <jasone@freebsd.org>, Tim Kientzle <kientzle@freebsd.org>, rgrav <des@des.no>, Peter Schuller <peter.schuller@infidyne.com> Subject: Re: ELF dynamic loader name [was: sbrk(2) broken] Message-ID: <1199763018.718.40.camel@RabbitsDen> In-Reply-To: <20080108101209.01800eb6@duncan.reilly.home> References: <E1JBmjZ-00047M-05@cs1.cs.huji.ac.il> <20080108101209.01800eb6@duncan.reilly.home>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tue, 2008-01-08 at 10:12 +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote: > On Mon, 07 Jan 2008 09:49:20 +0200 > Danny Braniss <danny@cs.huji.ac.il> wrote: > > > I'm concerned in trying to solve a problem we are facing here, were > > students/researchers > > write code, and soon will be hit by incompatible platforms. > > Encourage them to write their code in something portable, like > Java, scheme, python, matlab/octave? If they have to use > C/C++/Fortran/ etc, they could get used to distribution in > source? > > The binary compatibility wheel-of-reincarnation is an interesting > one to watch. When I was a student and post-grad at Uni, our > applications, when shared with colleagues, could very well have > needed to run on any of Vax, 68k, MIPS (32 or 64 bit), SPARC > (32-bit), ia32, x86 (16-bit: complicated pointers), with a few > PowerPC and Alpha systems coming in at the end. So we used > matlab or handed around source code. Before that it was > all-the-world's-a-vax (unless you were in an IBM shop.) We've all > been in a peculiar bubble for a few years where "almost everyone" > has been using ia32, and it has been easy to think that that's all > there is (except for weirdos), and that therefore binary > distribution is OK. I reckon that we're just coming out of that > mode, and transiting through something less even, probably until > amd64 completes it's clean-sweep and becomes the "one and only" > architecture again (to howls of protest from the ARM/embedded > crowd...) That'll be a little way off, though... > > [I'm doing a lot of my own new coding in PLT scheme at the > moment, and having a ball with it. (lang/drscheme in ports) I suspect you are not running contemporary 7.0 there: twinhead# uname -a FreeBSD twinhead.rabbitslawn.verizon.net 7.0-RC1 FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 #0: Tue Jan 1 19:22:56 EST 2008 root@twinhead.rabbitslawn.verizon.net:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/TWINHEAD i386 twinhead# make install ===> drscheme-370 is marked as broken: Fails to install (signal 11). *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/ports/lang/drscheme. twinhead# > Fast enough for what I'm doing, byte-code, static or JIT compiled, > and runs everywhere (including Windows and OSX).] > > What would be *really* cool would be the ability to have a JVM or > LLVM back-end in the kernel, as a first-class peer of the ELF > loader. Anyone know if anyone has tried such a thing on *BSD (or > even Linux, I guess)? If you have Linux distribution handy, you can look at /usr/src/linux/Documentation/binfmt_misc.txt. At least its Java incarnation has been around for a while. I have not seen widespread use of it, but then again, I have not been looking too hard. To be fair, compatibility of the JVMs is the story in and of its own, and most certainly is OT for this list. > > Cheers, > -- Alexandre "Sunny" Kovalenko
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?1199763018.718.40.camel>