Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:41:21 +0100 (BST) From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> To: arch@FreeBSD.org Cc: current@FreeBSD.org Subject: [libdispatch-dev] GCD libdispatch w/Blocks support working on Free (f Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.0909271126590.70406@fledge.watson.org>
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Dear all--
Those of you at the Cambridge devsummit are already aware of the port of
Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (GCD), a.k.a. libdispatch, to FreeBSD by Stacey
Son and I, in collaboration with Apple. I've now uploaded my GCD talk slides
to the wiki:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/200909DevSummit
We now have a devel/libdispatch port, which works out-of-the-box on FreeBSD
9-CURRENT. libdispatch requires modest changes to kqueue, which we will merge
to 8.x once the code freeze lifts.
As of yesterday, I have libdispatch working with Apple's "Blocks" C languae
extension as found in clang, the last major architecture component required to
use GCD-based applications FreeBSD. Jordan Hubbard at Apple has kindly
provided the necessary bits bundled up in a clang/llvm/compiler-rt package for
FreeBSD until the clang port is updated. Some details in the attached e-mail.
As I mentioned at the FreeBSD developer summit, this is a work-in-progress (in
particular, we don't support pthread work queues, which allow the kernel
schedule to get involved in expanding the size of the thread worker pool
dynamically), but it should now be more than adequate to use in practice.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:37:51 +0100 (BST)
From: Robert Watson <robert@fledge.watson.org>
To: libdispatch-dev@lists.macosforge.org
Subject: [libdispatch-dev] GCD libdispatch w/Blocks support working on FreeBSD
Dear all:
This is a quick update for those interested in the general portability of
libdispatch, and perhaps specifically FreeBSD.
With a bit of help from Jordan Hubbard, I now have libdispatch working with
Blocks on FreeBSD. Jordan has put up a FreeBSD clang-devel package that
includes Blocks parts and the C runtime bits here:
http://static.macosforge.org/libdispatch/downloads/clang-devel.tgz
I've updated the libdispatch build parts to detect and use Blocks when compiled
with clang, and fixed a few nits in libdispatch that I ran into along the way
(and one apparent clang bug). With Jordan's package as a starting point,
Blocks pretty much "just worked", so I'm optimistic that people will be able to
reproduce this on other platforms able to run the non-Blocks libdispatch
without much difficulty.
If you update to at least r45 of libdispatch, you should now be able to do:
CC=clang ./configure --with-blocks-runtime=/usr/local/lib
and get a libdispatch with Blocks support.
The reason for the configure argument is that the current clang-devel package
doesn't automatically add libBlocksRuntime dependency for binaries compiled
with -fblocks. Once Blocks support shakes out a bit more in clang/FreeBSD,
this should go away.
I am able to run basic Blocks-based test tools with GCD on FreeBSD without
difficulty. The FreeBSD port should be updated to reflect this shortly.
Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge
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