[Openmcl-devel] OpenMCL and Tiger status

[Gary Byers]

nOn Wed, 27 Apr 2005, Brian Mastenbrook wrote:

> On Apr 27, 2005, at 5:30 PM, Gary Byers wrote:
>
>> 0.14.3 still runs under Jaguar (I just tried.)  Rebuilding the kernel
>> fails (because of some header file problem; I hadn't tried that before.)
>> I checked a fix into the main CVS tree.
>> 
>> 0.14.4 might not (I haven't checked to see if anything I've done recently
>> might break under Jaguar.)
>> 
>> The new interface translator is based on GCC 4.0; I'm not sure if it's
>> possible to build GCC 4.0 under Jaguar, or if a binary buit on Panther
>> or later will run under Jaguar (it may need a more modern C library
>> than Jaguar provides.)
>> 
>> I'll try to test things under Jaguar before releasing 0.14.4; if I can
>> catch little things like the missing header file issue, I'll try to do
>> so (and it might indeed be a pleasant surprise if most things work.)
>
> A binary built on Panther will run on Jaguar. A binary built on Tiger will 
> not. I don't know how to get around this currently: the most obvious problem 
> is that even a Hello, World binary built on Tiger depends on libmx, which is 
> not present on Jaguar. A secondary problem is that if your application 
> defines a symbol with the same name as a C library symbol (notably for 
> providing functions like dlopen and nl_langinfo not present on Jaguar, or 
> making them actually /work/ on Panther), the binary built on Tiger still 
> seems to depend on these symbols being present in the C library, so it will 
> fail to load with an unresolved symbol error on Jaguar. I don't know why this 
> is. For now, I'm giving up on Jaguar support for SBCL because of these 
> issues; you may also find them an issue with OpenMCL.
>
> Brian Mastenbrook
> brian at mastenbrook.net
> http://www.iscblog.info/
>


When built on Tiger, the OpenMCL kernel happens not to link against
libmx; an OpenMCL kernel built on Tiger (about a minute ago) seems to
run fine under 10.2.8.

This is (partly) blind luck; it seems reasonable to assume that sooner
or later, that luck will run out and it'll become prohibitively difficult
to continue to simultaneously support Jaguar and move forward.