[fpc-devel] Building 2.1.4 for SPARC/Linux

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Jonas Maebe wrote:

> There are none for this particular problem. I've done a lot of sparc 
> fixes after 2.1.4 was released and this problem is now rarer, but still 
> occurs every now and then. It's caused by indeterminism in the register 
> allocator. See
> http://www.freepascal.org/mantis/view.php?id=8121
> 
> I haven't seen it happen at all lately in 2.3.1, but I have no idea why 
> that is (and whether this is pure coincidence, whether the bug is still 
> there but somehow hidden by other code, or whether it is actually fixed 
> there.

One thing I didn't mention is that I followed as near as I could manage to an 
identical build procedure on i386 and then SPARC, and it's only the latter 
that errored. It's mainly SPARC I'm interested in rather than i386, largely 
for the sake of Lazarus.

Which takes me to the interesting observation that with 2.0.4 Lazarus 0.9.22 
bombs during startup but that this disappears if the suspect code is preceded 
by a DebugLn(). I'd concluded reluctantly that that might be a code-generation 
problem and wanted to progress to a more recent FPC version before raising it.

What's the best way to move forwards- try to disable the check, investigate 
the unofficial 2.1.4 .deb, or jump straight to a later development version?

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]