[fpc-devel] Building and running FPC natively on ARM under Debian "Lenny"

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Jonas Maebe wrote:
> On 05 Oct 2010, at 10:05, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
> 
>> When running 2.4.0 on an ARM system (Debian v5 "Lenny", armel) with 
>> limited memory (32Mb RAM + 768Mb swap) and using it to compile a large 
>> project (Lazarus 0.9.28.2) I'm seeing intermittent failures which go 
>> away if the make is restarted. I've not seen this running on other 
>> platforms, and I don't believe it is a problem in the Lazarus sources 
>> since the build will eventually complete giving me runnable code.
> 
> A couple of days ago I fixed an error in svn trunk for ARMEL that caused 
> the stack to become temporarily unbalanced after performing syscalls 
> with 5 or more parameters (the bug is still there for OABI, but I can't 
> fix that because I don't have access to an OABI machine).

I don't at the moment have any spare ARM systems that I could set up and 
expose for testing. I've got some development boards (effectively, 
ARM-based PCs) but they came with CE and I'm not paying the manufacturer 
$500 for Linux...

> A side-effect of that bug was that if the caller passed the address of 
> its own result as one of the parameters to the system call, it would 
> afterwards return a random value as its result and checks for error 
> results caused random failures like the one you posted (the reproducible 
> case that allowed me to fix it was a similar error).

That sounds promising and I'll try it in a few days (once I've got the 
trial Lazarus compilations out of the way). What should I be doing- 
updating to trunk?

The overall exercise is extending the native testing I did of FPC on 
various platforms to Lazarus. Granted that not many people are likely to 
want to run it natively on an ARM target but I think it's still worth 
knowing whether it can be done.

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

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