[fpc-devel] FPC for FreeBSD/PowerPC

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Karoly Balogh (Charlie/SGR) said:
> > organic process, but unfortunately it doesn't happen in all of the BSDs at
> > the same time or even at all.
> 
> The questions is, can I just go in and upgrade our syscall interface to
> the newer calls (where makes sense), or do we intend to support older
> systems too?

To my knowledge there is no universal "newer" and "older" BSD syscall set. Are you
talking about something NetBSD specific? So the first thing would be to
qualify that, and/or verify in how much the other BSDs follow.

> I'd say should just upgrade to latest and greatest,
> especially if a given platform is neglected/was broken or barely
> maintained otherwise. Any objections?

If it is NetBSD specific, you can probably update the NetBSD part of the
port without qualms as long as all (relevant) architectures are supported by
current NetBSD and the version with the new calls is somewhat current (no
pre release stuff) Contrary to Linux, and to a lesser degree FreeBSD, the
syscalls don't differ between architectures.

It might require revalidating all ports, since e.g. structures might change
which in turn might mean validating them on all targets (mostly due to
padding)

I remembered btw that NetBSD did run briefly on PPC though, around FPC 1.9.2
on a PPC603, Florian helped with the assembler back then.  I remember the
main issue was some problem with fpu instructions needing alignment on 603
but not on 604e.