RE: blcr: Support for more arches.

From: Alan Woodland (ajw05_at_aber.ac.uk)
Date: Sun Aug 16 2009 - 09:10:50 PDT

  • Next message: Paul H. Hargrove: "Re: blcr: Support for more arches."
    (For readers on checkpoint_at_lbl_dot_gov blcr was accepted into Debian last  
    night)
    
    > It seems that your package currently doesn't work on all arches.
    > It fails with errors like:
    > checking build system type... alphaev68-unknown-linux-gnu
    > checking host system type... alphaev68-unknown-linux-gnu
    > configure: error: Sorry, architecture alphaev68 is not supported
    > at this time.
    This is correct
    
    > It seems that it atleast requires some porting work to add
    > other arches, but I think it's actually not that much?
    Mostly it's just vmadump that would need porting I think. It's pretty  
    sensitive to layout of process related structs I think, as well as  
    low level specifics like registers that are architecture dependent  
    obviously. The source is well structured and tidy though so someone  
    knowledgeable about the unsupported architectures should find it easy  
    enough to patch I think. The relevant places are:
    - vmadump4/
    - libcr/arch/
    - cr_module/arch/
    
    I just noticed too that there is actually a alpha version of vmadump  
    already there, so it's just libcr and cr_module that's missing for  
    alpha.
    
    I deliberately didn't mark it as amd64, i386, sparc, arm and ppc only  
    in the hopes that someone with hardware, time and knowledge might  
    contribute patches.
    
    > It also looks like this is Linux specific?  Do you think
    > this can work on kfreebsd or hurd?
    Hmm, that's an interesting one. The user space bits do a pretty good  
    job of insulating you from any/all kernel space mechanics that make  
    the checkpointing possible. I guess that means in theory it would be  
    possible to do quite sanely. I've got precisely no experience with  
    any *bsd kernel space development, and my knowledge of hurd is almost  
    the same too. Maybe it would have made sense to mark it as not for  
    the non-linux ports though to save the buildds from trying every time.
    
    I'm always interested in patches and I'm pretty sure upstream would  
    be grateful also.
    
    Alan
    

  • Next message: Paul H. Hargrove: "Re: blcr: Support for more arches."