[fpc-devel] FPC for FreeBSD/PowerPC

[Curtis Hamilton]

All,

I just formally subscribed to this mailing list.

I'm interested in fpc on FreeBSD/PowerPC, however, I don't want to 
create any additional work nor break something that's not broken. That 
being said, I'm willing to work on this alone or with anyone who is also 
interested. My personal work target is for PowerPC 64-bit (Power Mac 
G5), I do have 32-bit PowerPC (Power Mac G4) hardware available to me. 
FreeBSD runs on G4 and G5 Power Macs.

FYI, I did the work on getting native java (OpenJDK8) support on powerpc64.

Regards,
Curtis

On 08/08/17 07:25, Tomas Hajny wrote:

> Hi Charlie,
>
> Please note that the sender of the original post isn't subscribed to this
> mailing list (although he hasn't mentioned it in his post unfortunately) -
> forwarding this your post in Cc: now; I'll forward the other too without
> including the list.
>
> Tomas
>
>
> ---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
> Subject: Re: [fpc-devel] FPC for FreeBSD/PowerPC
> From:    "Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR)" <charlie at scenergy.dfmk.hu>
> Date:    Tue, August 8, 2017 12:32
> To:      "FPC developers' list" <fpc-devel at lists.freepascal.org>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, 7 Aug 2017, Curtis Hamilton wrote:
>
>> I'm interested to know if there has been work on fpc for
>> FreeBSD/PowerPC. I'm interested in the status and helping maintain fpc
>> for this platform.
> FreeBSD for PowerPC never existed in FPC (it's not even in the internal
> platform list, only FreeBSD/i386 and FreeBSD/x86-64). It's certainly
> possible to add it though, especially if someone steps up as a regular
> maintainer. I was recently thinking to revive and bring NetBSD for PowerPC
> support up to speed, after recently fixing/reviving NetBSD for m68k. But
> to be honest, even the far more popular x86_64 and i386 versions seem to
> need some love, and I'd say that probably also goes for FreeBSD (Marco?
> Any comments?). Maybe these efforts can be combined.
>
> I never ran FreeBSD before, I might have the hardware for the PowerPC
> version tho'. Does it run on one of the following: Mac mini G4, PowerBook
> G4 (5,6), PowerMac QuickSilver G4, bPlan Pegasos II G4?
>
> The main problem that most of the BSD and Unix platforms have a quite
> entangled backend in the FPC RTL (and even Darwin is considered a BSD in
> this case), so there's a high risk that one can break something else while
> fixing a certain platform, and most of it uses a quite old COMPAT syscall
> interface. So mapping up what's there and how to fix it for the future is
> the difficulty, while not breaking other Unices and BSDs in the process.
> :) But otherwise it's definitely doable.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Charlie
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