Re: 3.7-7 "final" VM for Unix

Hi,

Thanks, I've just updated box1.squeakfoundation.org with all of these new VMs and built new packages.

cheers

bruce

Ian Piumarta ian.piumarta@inria.fr wrote:

Date: Sat, 19 Mar 2005 16:45:46 -0800 From: Ian Piumarta ian.piumarta@inria.fr Subject: 3.7-7 "final" VM for Unix To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list squeak-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org Cc: vm-dev@discuss.squeakfoundation.org mailing-list: contact vm-dev-help@discuss.squeakfoundation.org; run by ezmlm content-length: 4015

Unix Hackers,

I am pleased (and relieved) to announce the "final" 3.7-7 VM for Unix. This VM is very close to 3.7b-5 (which has been working well for many people for some time) with the addition of several critical fixes.

Archives are in the usual place (http://squeak.hpl.hp.com/unix) for sources and a few pre-compiled binaries:

Darwin 7.8 PowerPC Mac OS X PowerPC FreeBSD 4.10 i386 NetBSD 1.6.1 i386 OpenBSD 3.4 i386 Solaris 2.9 i386 Solaris 2.9 Sparc GNU/Linux PowerPC GNU/Linux i686

(.rpms and .debs will follow shortly. Due to limited physical access to machines I have only been able to test this release on Darwin-PPC, MacOSX-PPC, and GNU/Linux-i686.)

If you prefer to fetch the sources from our Subversion repository:

svn export http://squeak.hpl.hp.com/svn/squeak/tags/unix-3.7-7

(The repository source now includes everything needed to build the Unix VM. No more guessing which magical combination of image-side stuff is needed to generate a working Interpreter and plugins. FWIW, the generated sources used in this release are those found in the released "final" 3.7-5898-full image [following my usual rule] plus [exceptionally] Ned's "2GB oop" patches, which are included in the 'unix/misc' directory of both the source archive and repository.)

Enjoy!

Ian

PS: A small reminder. Please send VM-related problems/bugs/fixes to the VM-Dev list (see discuss.squeakfoundation.org). VM-related posts to the general-purpose squeak-dev list are not guaranteed to be seen, let alone acted upon, by the relevant people.

  If you're sending me Unix-specific VM fixes, please send *entire*
  modified files (not 'diffs', of any flavour) since I read and
  manually apply all patches, one line at a time, using ediff in
  Emacs.  Fixes should usually be sent to me directly (ian [point]
  piumarta [chez] squeakland [point] org) and not copied to any
  mailing list, *please*.  (Partly traffic, but mostly to keep my
  remaining 'uncompromised' email addresses out of
  publicly-archived lists.)  Thanks!

PPS: Here are the release notes (relative to the 3.6 stable release) for anyone interested...

VM:

Netscape plugin understands "imageName" and "failureURL" attributes in <embed ...> tags.

Less noise from dlopen() and friends when probing for plugins.

Problems preventing more than one external plugin from loading in Mac OS X fixed.

Obscure bug fixed that prevented socket options being set on some platforms.

NPSqueak improvements and bug fixes from Bert Freudenberg and Jens Lincke. New environment variable SQUEAK_USERDIR used to find plugin image; defaults to 'My Squeak'. (NPS may not work for users of shells other than bash. Contact Bert if you have problems.)

Interpreter changes from Ned Konz that avoid image segment loading errors caused by oops >= 2GB.

VM drivers:

Drag-and-drop support added to the X11 display driver.

vm-sound-NAS driver explicitly depends on libaudio.

New option '-glxdebug <n>' sets OpenGL debug message level for X11 display.

Plugins:

Additional checks for external data in SocketPlugin.

New OSProcessPlugin (including XDpyPlg and AioPlg).

Build:

Optimisation flags default to '-O' if compiler not recognised.

sqGnu.h asm() statements fixed for gcc-3.1 compatibility.

Use of alloca() made more portable.

SVN repository now includes contents of 'src' directory used to build Unix binaries. No more endless searching for the right combination of obscure VMM version and image updates.

Build instructions updated for SVN and recent organisational changes.

'gnuify' inserts a #error into gnu-interp.c if it detects a problem (causing cpp to barf cleanly with a comprehensible error message, rather than leaving the compiler to spew hundreds of obscure error messages).

Documentation:

URIs updated to reflect recent organisational changes.