Building R13B01 on IRIX problems

[Patrick Baggett]

I'm having a problem building Erlang/OTP R13B01 on IRIX using MIPSpro C
compiler v7.4.4. Previously, some of the R12 releases build with a bit of
convincing, but now it doesn't seem to want to work. I am having two issues:

1) For some reason, the configure script detects uio.h for use, but it
doesn't actually seem to be available. The IRIX manpages refer to it as a
kernel/device driver interface, so it likely isn't available in user-space
programs such as Erlang/OTP. This causes beam/io.c to not compile because
the iovec structure isn't available though configure says it is. The last
time I had this problem in R12x, I just simply #undef'd the variable and
everything compiled great. Performing the same hack works, but it would be
better to fix it at the configure script level. I have no knowledge of
configure scripts, but I am very proficient with C, if that is of any use.
I'm sure fix for that is pretty simple, though.

2) Problem that is new for R13B+, possibly earlier. I get linker errors to
the "functions" __builtin_return_address() and __builtin_expect(). These are
GCC-specific extensions to the C language which are not available to
MIPSpro. Usually this is solved by #define'ing a macro for them. The modules
with linking errors are sys_float.c and ethread.c. The configure script
detects whether or not GCC is being used -- shouldn't the system be able to
handle when GCC isn't used?

Patrick