[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).
> 
> 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 fix has a definite improvement on the reliability of the compiler. 
Before applying it I found that I couldn't get 2.4.0 to recompile 
itself, I had to revert to 2.2.2.

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

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