Squeak-dev February 1999

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148 participants
356 discussions

2.3 VMs do NOT hang on 68K (was Re: [BUG] 2.3 VMs hang on 68K)
by Mark Guzdial 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

Thanks, John and Bruce! The CFM-68K was what I needed. Squeak 2.3 68K now runs on my 190cs. I have not yet been able to get Squeak 2.3b to execute correctly, though. It halts with "QuickTimeLib not found". I've reinstalled QuickTime 3.0 twice, the second time after deleting all of QuickTime, first. I am running OS 7.6.1, which may be the problem. I'm trying to upgrade to System 8.1 now. Mark At 8:50 AM -0800 2/23/99, johnm(a)wdi.disney.com wrote: >Mark and Pat, > >The 2.3 VM's run under the 68K "Code Fragment Manager" (CFM). This >had to be done in order to handle shared libraries on the 68K Mac, >and shared libraries are how we implement pluggable primitives. > >Apple simply does NOT support running 68K-CFM applications >under emulation on PowerPC Macs. Annoying, but that's >the way it is. > >On a 68K Mac, you have to have the right version of the >"CFM-68K Runtime Enabler" extension in your system folder. >The version that I know works is 4.0 (424148 bytes). It's available >on the Apple website somewhere, or I can send you a copy. > >When I first tried to get the new CFM version of the 68K >VM going, I had an older version of this extension >and the VM wouldn't start. It tooks me several weeks to >finally ferret out the answer in an obscure Apple >release note. > >Good luck! Please report to the Squeak list if you get >it working, since others may be having problems. > > -- John > > >Mark Guzdial <guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu> wrote: >> >Subject: [BUG] 2.3 VMs hang on 68K >> >Date: Mon, 22 Feb 99 10:34:55 -0800 >> >x-sender: pat_caudill(a)mail.instantiations.com >> >From: Pat Caudill <Pat_Caudill(a)instantiations.com> >> >To: "Mark Guzdial" <guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu> >> > >> >I can't get either 2.3 or 2.3b 68K VMs to run on my Powerbook 190cs (68040 >> >based), even with no extensions on. I was having problems running the 68K >> >VMs on my G3 -- I thought that they should (via the 68K emulator), but I >> >chalked it up to non-backwards-compatibility. But now that I've tried on >> >an >> >actual 68K box, I'm quite sure that it's the VMs. >> > >> >I haven't tried this but from my experiences with Smalltalik/V macintosh. >> >These systems use (or emulate) the 68lc040 chip. That chip does not >> >include the floating point instructions. The macintosh libraries will >> >automaticly switch to the software floating point unless the program is >> >compiled to directly include floating point instructions. Is it possible >> >that this occured for one or more of the compiles when the VM was built? >> > >> >Pat Caudill >> >patc(a)instantiations.com -------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

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getting started
by Eric Ryan 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

I'd like to buy a PC and run squeak and a free unix on it, probably linux. I know that I should get a 3 button mouse becuase I *don't* want to be pressing the control button to do simple gui things. I don't know what kind of mouse to get, nor what sort of driver restrictions there are. I also don't know what sort of processor speed and RAM quantity would be appropriate for a Squeak developer. Are there restrictions on the kind of video card? Is there usefully better performance running squeak on standard intel hardware directly rather than having the squeak run on a unix running on the intel hardware? Could someone please suggest a mouse and video card as well as minimal processor and memory? Eric

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RE: getting started
by Raab, Andreas 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

Hi, My recommendation is to buy some piece of standard hardware, and not necessarily go for the 'oh-we-have-this-two-bucks-less-and-close-to-compatible-piece-of-hardware' (yes, I *am* from Germany ;-) In any case, if you buy a new computer you should be pretty happy with something in the Pentium >= 200Mhz range, plenty of RAM (this never hurts, say 64MB or more) plus a decent sized hard disk. Running Linux instead of Windows is actually a pretty good idea, unless you need to use Word or anything alike. In general, Squeak is *very* happy with Linux (I'm not sure about FreeBSD - there are not that many Squeakers on FreeBSD out there) and the choice of your graphics hardware should depend on the X-Server you're planning to use. Since I assume it will be XFree86 you should visit www.xfree86.org and see for which hardware accellerated drivers exist (these give you the most out of your hardware). There is only one possible problem with running Squeak on Linux - some of the multi-media stuff (e.g., sound and MIDI) is not supported by the 'standard' VM. However, I know that a couple of people on the list have been working on this and so it should actually be possible to get a custom VM from one of them. Happy Squeaking, Andreas -- PLEASE NOTE NEW EMAIL ADRESS! +===== Andreas Raab ========= (andreasr(a)wdi.disney.com) ==+ | Walt Disney Imagineering Phone: +1 818 544 5016 I I Glendale, CA Fax: +1 818 544 4544 I +======< http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~raab >========+ > ---------- > From: Eric Ryan > Reply To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu > Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 1999 7:39 AM > To: squeak(a)cs.uiuc.edu > Cc: recipient list not shown > Subject: getting started > > I'd like to buy a PC and run squeak and a free unix on it, probably linux. > > I know that I should get a 3 button mouse becuase I *don't* want to be > pressing the control button to do simple gui things. I don't know what > kind of mouse to get, nor what sort of driver restrictions there are. I > also don't know what sort of processor speed and RAM quantity would be > appropriate for a Squeak developer. Are there restrictions on the kind > of video card? Is there usefully better performance running squeak on > standard intel hardware directly rather than having the squeak run on a > unix running on the intel hardware? > Could someone please suggest a mouse and video card as well as minimal > processor and memory? > Eric >

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Re: getting started
by Lex Spoon 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

Eric Ryan <lion(a)serv.net> wrote: > I'd like to buy a PC and run squeak and a free unix on it, probably linux. > I know that I should get a 3 button mouse becuase I *don't* want to be > pressing the control button to do simple gui things. I don't know what > kind of mouse to get, nor what sort of driver restrictions there are. I > also don't know what sort of processor speed and RAM quantity would be > appropriate for a Squeak developer. Are there restrictions on the kind > of video card? Is there usefully better performance running squeak on > standard intel hardware directly rather than having the squeak run on a > unix running on the intel hardware? > Could someone please suggest a mouse and video card as well as minimal > processor and memory? > Eric Squeak will be fine with just about anything you can buy in the stores today. Here's a stab at some comfortable, inexpensive "minimums" -- you can do with less, but these are really cheap and will definately be safe: - Pentium 166 - 32 MB of RAM - a video card that does 800x600 with 64k colors - a three button mouse So why do people bother to sell all these expensive computers in the store? That would be games, games, and games. Lex

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[BUG] 2.3 VMs hang on 68K
by Mark Guzdial 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

I can't get either 2.3 or 2.3b 68K VMs to run on my Powerbook 190cs (68040 based), even with no extensions on. I was having problems running the 68K VMs on my G3 -- I thought that they should (via the 68K emulator), but I chalked it up to non-backwards-compatibility. But now that I've tried on an actual 68K box, I'm quite sure that it's the VMs. Sometimes, I get an illegal instruction error in Macsbug, error 10 with no extensions on. Most often, though, the mouse cursor freezes and everything's dead. Mark -------------------------- Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280 (404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial(a)cc.gatech.edu http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html

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Re: Optimizing Squeak
by Dwight Hughes 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

Travis Griggs wrote: > I follow these threads with rapt attention, but I have to admit my ignorance on what is meant by "translate to threaded code". I know what byte codes are, I know what native code is, and how the JIT stuff does it's dynamic cacheing, but what the heck is "threaded code." Please excuse my ignorance. Either I'm a big idiot, or there's a bunch of other idiots out there for not asking. :) > Fundamentally, in threaded code, the execution tokens are the addresses of the interpretive routines, either directly (direct threaded code) or indirectly through a jump table (token threaded code). So the core of the interpreter dispatch loop becomes trivial -- and very fast. Threaded tokens are usually a machine word long. There are an assortment of variants on these schemes, as can be seen here: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/threaded-code.html -- Dwight

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Re: Optimizing Squeak
by Tim Olson 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

Greg wrote: >Modern processor generally contain a Branch Target Cache (P6, PowerPC 750) >or next instruction cache line pointer (K7). These can be used >to predict indirect branches as well as direct branches. There are at least 2 kinds of Branch Target Caches: Branch Target Address Cache [BTAC] (P6, PowerPC 604e) this cache is indexed by the address of the branch instruction, and returns the address of the predicted target Branch Target Instruction Cache [BTIC] (AMD 29K, PowerPC 750) this cache is indexed by the address of the branch target, and returns the first few instructions at that target BTAC structures can be used to predict indirect as well as conditional branches. BTICs are used to solve a slightly different problem, and are usually indexed by the branch target address, meaning that it has to be computed before the branch prediction hardware can start fetching down the predicted path. >On the other hand, self-modifying code can be expensive in real >processors. Some RISC processors used to have to flush the I-cache >when any code is modified. I am not sure whether this is true any more. PowerPC processors use the ICBI (Instruction Cache Block Invalidate) instruction to invalidate a potentially stale block from the icache, and the DCBST instruction to force a modified data cache block to memory so that the instruction prefetcher can see the new instructions. This sequence isn't cheap, but it's much less expensive than flushing the entire icache. >The best bet would be to try out both code sequences in >a variety of processors and see which runs faster on average. Yes, empirical testing is probably required, here. The big unknown is the percentage of high-utilization method sends that always send to the same class, vs. polymorphic dispatch. Inline caches (self-modifying code) will be a win for the former, while indirect lookup will be better for the later. -- tim

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RE: Building Squeak 2.3 for IRIX.
by Raab, Andreas 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

One minor note: > For now, I have changed "-mips2 -32" to "-n32 mips3". The advantage of > this option is that it compiles to the newest ABI in a way that will run > on both R4000 series and R5000 series machines. (I can compile this on > my desk and expect it to run lots of places.) The n32 ABI is alleged to > be the higest performance of the current 32 bit ABI's extant. The > DISadvantage is that the compiler is a LOT more finicky. > And that it won't run on older Irix versions. -32 runs on 5.3 and later (-n32 does not) and there are still a couple of machines running 5.3/5.4 (WDI just switched from 5.3 to 6.2 on one of our primary machines). Andreas -- PLEASE NOTE NEW EMAIL ADRESS! +===== Andreas Raab ========= (andreasr(a)wdi.disney.com) ==+ | Walt Disney Imagineering Phone: +1 818 544 5016 I I Glendale, CA Fax: +1 818 544 4544 I +======< http://isgwww.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/~raab >========+

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Re: [ENH] Decompress to file
by Tim Rowledge 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

On Mon 22 Feb, Lex Spoon wrote: > This is reminiscent of the Object>>do: discussion that comes around > every once in a while. > > Question: if you want to ftp a ZIP file somewhere, does the OS insist on > transparently unzipping the file, so that you have to zip it again > within ftp? Good question; that would be really irritating. RiscOS treats zip files (and others) as directories with the zippedfiles as entries within it. In _most_ situations this works just nicely. > > I love this feature for the top-level user shell (well, I'm sure I would > if my system was set up for it) . However, lower levels I believe > should really treat files as files and not get too smart about it. Even > at the top levels, it should be possible to turn the feature off for a > while in cases where it does the wrong thing. Exactly - there is one format of archive (can't recall which) that messes up when found by the webbrowser and makes it 'open' the archive instead of just grabbing it. As a result you end up having to quit the auxiliary FS, get the archive file and let the auxiliary FS startup again next time you find an archive filetype. Either that or let the WB load the archive as demented text and then 'save as HTML' and reset the filetype. But I'm sure you didn't want to know that.... All in all, it's a wonderful facility which I'd hate to do without. -- Strange OpCodes: LA: Lockout Access Tim Rowledge: rowledge(a)interval.com (w) +1 (650) 842-6110 (w) tim(a)sumeru.stanford.edu (h) <http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim>

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Re: Need help building 2.3 VM.
by Lex Spoon 23 Feb '99

23 Feb '99

I had trouble building under some version of IRIX or another, too. I ended up doing something like "gcc -o Squeak *.c -lm -lX11" to get it to work, which seemed to work fine. I didn't try the pluggable primitives with this particular compile, though, so maybe those didn't work. Lex Bill Cattey <wdc(a)MIT.EDU> wrote: > Nobody ever replied with my questions about building the VM under SGI IRIX. > > While waiting, I experimented building under Solaris 2.6. > The VM build there is apparently successful but has two consistent bad > behaviors: > > Attempting to enter Play With Me 3 (16 bits) hangs the VM and ALT . > cannot interrupt. > Running the B3DBox demo displays NOTHING, and the X cursor disappears. > (IE no cursor is shown when the mouse enters the Squeak Window.) > > I presume folks were deferring to Ian for answers to build questions, > but he seems pretty swamped, so I'd be grateful if others would chime in. > > Note also: I updated my source to take Ian's latest redefinition of > ioMicroMSecs. > > Is there something else that needs to be touched before a completely > happy VM is built? > > -wdc

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