[erlang-questions] HiPE on ARM Build Issue

[Andrew Wiley]

On Sat, Apr 14, 2012 at 3:12 AM, Kostis Sagonas <kostis@REDACTED> wrote:
>
> In the HiPE team we would very much like to support the ARM architecture
> but the problem these days - for quite some time actually - is that we do
> not have access to any machine with an ARM processor. It's very painful to
> be testing ARM using QEMU, esp. all sorts of different ARMs that exist
> these days. Hence, occasionally code tends to rot or, as in this case which
> involves a newer ARMv7, code has never been tested on newer architectures.
>
> (I do not know what sort of access to ARM machines the Erlang/OTP team at
> Ericsson has, but I suspect that they do not have access to all possible
> ARMs either.)
>
> In this particular case, I would recommend that you extend the following
> lines in erts/configure.in
>
>    armv5b)     ARCH=arm;;
>    armv5teb)   ARCH=arm;;
>    armv5tel)   ARCH=arm;;
>
> with the line that corresponds to your newer armv7 and test to see what
> happens.  If all goes well, please submit a patch using git.
>

I added:
     armv5b)    ARCH=arm;;
     armv5teb)  ARCH=arm;;
     armv5tel)  ARCH=arm;;
+    armv7l)     ARCH=arm;;

to configure.in and reran autotools.


>
> Also, since you are on an unexplored territory, I would recommend to build
> Erlang/OTP in two steps. First do:
>
>        ./configure --enable-hipe ...
>
> which will test if Erlang/OTP can be built with HiPE support, and only if
> that works do:
>
>        make clean  // or start from a fresh copy, for extra safety
>        ./configure --enable-hipe ... --enable-native-libs
>

I kicked off the build before you replied, and a build with both
--enable-hipe and --enable-native libs completed successfully. However,
when I try to get Hipe to build native code afterwards:
[wiley@REDACTED erlang]$ erlc -W  +debug_info +native +inline main.erl

Crash dump was written to: erl_crash.dump
Invalid tag in make_hash2(0x735F7374)
Aborted
[wiley@REDACTED erlang]$ erlc -W +native +inline main.erl
Segmentation fault
[wiley@REDACTED erlang]$ erlc -W +native main.erl
Segmentation fault
[wiley@REDACTED erlang]$ gdb erlc
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4
[...cut...]
Reading symbols from /usr/bin/erlc...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) set args -W +native main.erl
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/erlc -W +native main.erl
process 20137 is executing new program: /bin/bash
process 20137 is executing new program:
/usr/lib/erlang/erts-5.9.1/bin/erlexec
process 20137 is executing new program:
/usr/lib/erlang/erts-5.9.1/bin/beam.smp
[Thread debugging using libthread_db enabled]
Using host libthread_db library "/lib/libthread_db.so.1".
[New Thread 0x40da8470 (LWP 20143)]
[New Thread 0x415a8470 (LWP 20144)]
[New Thread 0x4002c470 (LWP 20145)]
[New Thread 0x41da8470 (LWP 20146)]
[New Thread 0x425a8470 (LWP 20147)]
[New Thread 0x42da8470 (LWP 20148)]

Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault.
[Switching to Thread 0x41da8470 (LWP 20146)]
0x0007b9a4 in make_hash2 ()
(gdb) bt
#0  0x0007b9a4 in make_hash2 ()
#1  0x000a9fbc in put_2 ()
#2  0x0014dca4 in nbif_put_2 ()
#3  0x0014dca4 in nbif_put_2 ()
Backtrace stopped: previous frame identical to this frame (corrupt stack?)


> PS. We welcome support, for example, donations of ARM-based machines that
> we can be using to test the HiPE compiler or its newer LLVM-based back-end
> (see http://erllvm.softlab.ntua.gr/**) more regularly. Similar with other
> exotic architectures that people these days care about. Minimally, if you
> want native code for some configuration other than x86 and x86_64-based
> machines, give us some form of remote access to it.
>

I'm a college student who randomly felt like learning Erlang might be
useful, I'm not really in a position to donate hardware, and I'm a bit
leery about giving out shell accounts on what's essentially my router, but
I'll see what I can do.
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