[erlang-questions] hipe on freebsd/x86

[Mikael Pettersson]

On Fri, 20 Oct 2006 23:06:51 -0600, <calmasy@REDACTED> wrote:
>I've noticed that on my FreeBSD 5.4/x86 machine that hipe is not built
>by default.  I have to add '--enable-hipe' (an undocumented option) to
>./configure, and then it gets compiled in.  Is this the right
>behavior?  Shouldn't hipe just be picked up automatically on platforms
>like FreeBSD that support it?

HiPE is autoenabled on supported platforms. However, "supported"
does not mean "seems to maybe work on", it means that we regularly
test on those platforms and will fix problems if/when they occur.

>BTW, can anyone point me to a comprehensive list of OS/platform combos
>that hipe is available on?  I've not been able to find this, and am
>just using trial and error.  So far it seems to work on Linux (x86 and
>amd64) and freebsd/x86, but NOT on openbsd/x86 or solaris/x86.

x86: 386 and newer CPUs supported on Linux and Solaris 9. On Linux NPTL
glibc is preferred, or a LinuxThreads glibc configured to access thread
state via a segment register ("floating stacks"). With a non-floating
stacks glibc you must build the system without thread support if you
want HiPE support. HiPE/x86 used to work on Solaris 8, and may work on
Solaris 10, but we only have access to a Solaris 9 box for testing.

AMD64/Intel64: supported on Linux.
PowerPC: supports 32-bit user-mode processes on Linux and OSX.
ARM: supports big-endian v5 CPUs (XScale) on Linux.
SPARC: supports v9 CPUs running 32-bit user-mode on Solaris and Linux.

HiPE/x86 should work on OSX, and may work on FreeBSD, but since
we don't have those systems we won't pretend to support them.
User can still ./configure --enable-hipe if their systems do
in fact work with HiPE.

That ./configure --help doesn't list --enable-hipe is a bug; I'll
make sure that it gets fixed before R11B-2.

/Mikael