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Emulation / Re: Power MachTen kicks ass. Can we compile QEMU for it?
« Last post by laulandn on Today at 08:31:30 AM »BTW Over at macintoshgarden a user named Flk157 and I made a fresh effort to get a version of GCC 3.x for MachTen...and did not succeed. The discussion started with a problem using g77, the Ada part of the GCC suite...but then Flk157 needed a newer version, and since g77 is really just another face for GCC, started working on that. I followed along, offered ideas and encouragement, as I could:
You can read all the gory details, but my conclusion is that, although MachTen is truly an amazing piece of engineering, it is built on too limited a foundation, and many compromises were made in memory management. Because of these, it is very likely impossible to build natively.
Although Flk157 made a truly valiant attempt to figure out where things were breaking down and was trying workarounds, he is still stuck as far as I know. Personally, I think it COULD be possible, but probably would entail a very large amount of work, learning and hacking the Byzantine GCC build process...which makes many assumptions about memory, how it is shared between processes, how pipes work, and more, which, unfortunately, look like they are not QUITE good enough in MachTen.
https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/problems-machtencodebuilder-and-ada
But...talking about it just now I had an idea...it might be possible to build a cross compiler on another host...or something like that. In fact...it might be possible to do so using the M68k version of MachTen, because it reportedly, compared to the PowerPC version, has a more sophisticated memory subsystem...it at least provides some amount of memory protection, which implies they are using the MMU, and, if so, they COULD have done shared memory and pipes correctly...I'm going to mention this to him now...
You can read all the gory details, but my conclusion is that, although MachTen is truly an amazing piece of engineering, it is built on too limited a foundation, and many compromises were made in memory management. Because of these, it is very likely impossible to build natively.
Although Flk157 made a truly valiant attempt to figure out where things were breaking down and was trying workarounds, he is still stuck as far as I know. Personally, I think it COULD be possible, but probably would entail a very large amount of work, learning and hacking the Byzantine GCC build process...which makes many assumptions about memory, how it is shared between processes, how pipes work, and more, which, unfortunately, look like they are not QUITE good enough in MachTen.
https://macintoshgarden.org/forum/problems-machtencodebuilder-and-ada
But...talking about it just now I had an idea...it might be possible to build a cross compiler on another host...or something like that. In fact...it might be possible to do so using the M68k version of MachTen, because it reportedly, compared to the PowerPC version, has a more sophisticated memory subsystem...it at least provides some amount of memory protection, which implies they are using the MMU, and, if so, they COULD have done shared memory and pipes correctly...I'm going to mention this to him now...