[fpc-devel] FreeBSD PowerPC64 Port

[Karoly Balogh]

Hi

On Mon, 19 Apr 2021, Curtis Hamilton via fpc-devel wrote:

>>       Thanks for reaching back. I’d the feeling that there wasn’t much
>> interest when I didn’t get a lot of feedback from the FreeBSD/PowerPC
>> community.
>>
>> I’ve looked at the changes to support aarch64.  I’ve already gotten
>> things to a point where I can build a cross compiler for FreeBSD
>> PowerPC.

Are your changes available somewhere in form of a patch?

>> But l’m struggling with the start up code, as I’m lost when it comes to
>> coding in assembly.
>>
>> This may be a lost cause.

It never is, some of us are really interested to add ports, especially in
case where it's BSD, where the system is already supported, one only needs
to add another CPU, write some startup code, and maybe tidy up some stuff
here and there.

Do you have a box available for testing which is reachable remotely for
testing/running the compiler? I'm happy to help, but setting up
development enviroments especially for relatively rare systems on older
Macs is not always easy. And/or some QEMU/other emulator setup including a
disk image + documentation on how to get it running which one can just
download and start working?

I have an older PowerMac, but honestly, I don't want to spend several days
trying to get FreeBSD running on it and figuring out the basics, just to
finally be able to start working on FPC, although if you can provide a
disk image which can be used to boot a physical Mac without fiddling with
the installer, that could work too. Ideally something which boots on a
PowerMac G4 Gigabit Ethernet or Quicksilver with an ATI Radeon 9000 or an
ATI Rage 128.

Cheers,
--
Charlie