On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 08:59:13PM +0100, Bert Freudenberg wrote:
On 29.12.2009, at 15:57, David T. Lewis wrote:
On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 01:55:12PM +0100, Jos? L. Redrejo Rodr?guez wrote:
- Gstreamer and Pango plugins segfault in amd64, so any image using them
will segfault in this architecture. So latest version of etoys will have this problem.
I can confirm this. I believe that there are some underlying issues with SurfacePlugin that affect Pango and possibly others on 64-bit hosts. No fix is available at the present time.
I just realized that we don't have a Mantis report for this issue, so I added one: http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7433
Can't we just disable building of these plugins until this is resolved? It's better to not have them than have them crashing.
IMO, the simplest way to handle this near term is just to maintain a different VMMaker .config file for the 64-bit build.
But I do think that there are some points that need to be clearly stated to avoid misunderstanding:
- For general use on Linux distributions, the currently supported configuration is the 32-bit VM running on 64-bit Linux. This is stable and provides good performance. It does require the installation of various 32-bit libraries as a prerequisite.
- There is currently no supported 64-bit Linux VM. If you choose to build and distribute one, you are necessarily taking on the responsibility of selecting the subset of plugins that you are comfortable supporting.
- Building and distributing a 64-bit VM using the generated source code in the platforms/unix/src/ tree is likely to cause problems. All of the supported VMs that are found on http://squeakvm.org/unix/ are built from that source tree, and they are all 32-bit VMs. If you build this source in 64-bit mode, you will be compiling a number of plugins that will not work.
I would have no hesitation in recommending the use of 64-bit VMs for applications such as Seaside servers, or for use by anyone who does not require multimedia, Pango, and so forth. I use one all the time for my own use, and it is no problem at all. But supporting a 64-bit distribution for general Linux users is a big job. If someone chooses to do it, that's a Really Good Thing, but it should be done with an awareness of the current limitations of the 64-bit VM.
I also want to emphasize that there is nothing at all wrong with running the 32-bit VM on 64-bit Linux. The only drawback is the need for installing some 32-bit runtime libraries. But it works great, it's stable, it's fast, and you can download all the sources and executables from http://squeakvm.org/unix/.
Dave