Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64?

I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Interest in FreeBSD is apparently very little in the last years within the FPC universe, considering the half backend support even for x86-64. Even more after the main FPC FreeBSD port contributor Marco switched years ago to windows.

But if you have questions on certain points regarding FPC, I am pretty sure somebody can answer you them here.

Curtis Hamilton wrote

Is there any interest in porting FPC to Freebsd/PowerPC64? I'm looking for some help with port FPC to FreeBSD on PowerPC.  Any assistance would be appreciated.

You can orient yourself at the changes done to port FPC to aarch64-freebsd in revision 49157.

Regards,
Sven

Thanks for reaching back. I’d the feeling that there wasn’t much interest when I didn’t get a lot of feedback from the FreeBSD/PowerPC community.

I’ve looked at the changes to support aarch64. I’ve already gotten things to a point where I can build a cross compiler for FreeBSD PowerPC. But l’m struggling with the start up code, as I’m lost when it comes to coding in assembly.

This may be a lost cause.

Hi

Are your changes available somewhere in form of a patch?

> But l’m struggling with the start up code, as I’m lost when it comes to > coding in assembly. > > This may be a lost cause.

It never is, some of us are really interested to add ports, especially in case where it's BSD, where the system is already supported, one only needs to add another CPU, write some startup code, and maybe tidy up some stuff here and there.

Do you have a box available for testing which is reachable remotely for testing/running the compiler? I'm happy to help, but setting up development enviroments especially for relatively rare systems on older Macs is not always easy. And/or some QEMU/other emulator setup including a disk image + documentation on how to get it running which one can just download and start working?

I have an older PowerMac, but honestly, I don't want to spend several days trying to get FreeBSD running on it and figuring out the basics, just to finally be able to start working on FPC, although if you can provide a disk image which can be used to boot a physical Mac without fiddling with the installer, that could work too. Ideally something which boots on a PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet or Quicksilver with an ATI Radeon 9000 or an ATI Rage 128.

Cheers,

Op 2021-04-18 om 11:40 schreef Florian Klämpfl via fpc-devel:

Half backend support? Did you mean _LLVM_ backend support? There is none, save some work I did in Berlin.

Even more after the main FPC FreeBSD port contributor Marco switched years ago to windows.

No, it was my remote shell account changing from FreeBSD on own hosted systems to a linux account on a commercial shared server. I mostly booted own systems under Windows since I left college (which, admittedly, in my case was fairly late)

But the real kicker was the LLVM migration that necessitates things in startup that I'm not capable off. Even less so with toolchains that randomly seem to drop sections instead of reporting an error.

I'm told that with FreeBSD13, the last lifeline, ld.bfd will be gone, and the last somewhat workable version(11) goes out of support in September.

If somebody can provide a base system (iow simple binaries and simple libc linked binaries) working on LLVM basis,  it should be easy to pick it up again though. Even with the old port, people often helped me with the startup code (Pierre with 64-bit, Florian and Jonas with 32-bit PIC iirc)

I meant baked, sorry.

Startup code, in particular was we use pascal ones now is normally not a problem ;)

Even less so with toolchains that randomly seem to drop sections instead of reporting an error. I'm told that with FreeBSD13, the last lifeline, ld.bfd will be gone, and the last somewhat workable version(11) goes out of support in September.

IIRC, lld simply crashed with FPC linker files, so I think this was the reason why I gave up on it.

Karoly Balogh wrote

I have an older PowerMac, but honestly, I don't want to spend several days trying to get FreeBSD running on it

It's for PPC64LE. I think not even PowerMac G5s are supported by it.

Jonas

I’m going to give this another try. I'm looking for some help with porting FPC to FreeBSD 13 on PowerPC64. Specifically, I’m looking for help with the startup code.

I’m using a Raptor Blackbird Power9 system and will provide access if needed.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

Hi!

If you give me ssh access, I can have a look.

Jonas

Thanks for the response.

I’ll set it up for you and provide you all the details.

Regards

On Mon, Nov 1, 2021 at 8:22 AM Jonas Maebe via fpc-devel <

Access info was sent to via under separate email. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Curtis