[fpc-devel] FPC for FreeBSD/PowerPC

[Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR)]

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