Re: HEADS UP! KSE needs more attention

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 16:33, Scott Long wrote:
> Doug Rabson wrote:
> > On Sunday 06 June 2004 20:55, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> > 
> >>On Sun, 6 Jun 2004, Scott Long wrote:
> >>
> >>>All,
> >>>
> >>>We are about 4-6 weeks away from starting the 5.3 release cycle. 
> >>>As it stands, KSE still only works reliably on i386.  There are
> >>>reports of significant instability on amd64, and it doesn't work at
> >>>all on alpha and sparc64.  I'm willing to drop the alpha
> >>>requirement and maybe even the sparc64 requirement, but there
> >>>absolutely will not be a 5.3 until amd64 is solid.  Please contact
> >>>myself, Dan Eischen, and David Xu if you are interested in helping
> >>>out.
> >>
> >>amd64 looks to be a problem in readline which doesn't seem
> >>to redispatch signal handlers with SA_SIGINFO arguments.
> >>
> >>David also has patches for debugging support at:
> >>
> >>  http://people.freebsd.org/~davidxu/kse/dbg/
> >>
> >>Doug Rabson also has basic TLS support working in perforce.
> >>It'd be nice to get TLS and debugging in before 5.3-release.
> > 
> > 
> > I'll probably try to commit some kind of TLS support into current in the 
> > next couple of weeks. Its likely to only support i386 and will be 
> > stubbed out for other platforms. Right now, I'm just waiting for some 
> > kind of feedback from an nvidia developer whos testing it.
> 
> I'm happy to see that it's gotten this far along, but it needs to be
> available on all tier-1 platforms when it goes in.  For the sake of
> argument, we'll call that amd64 and possibly sparc64.  My understanding
> is that amd64 should be very similar to i386, yes?  Please let me know
> what kind of help you need with getting this done.

Well I'm not so sure that it does need to be supported on all tier 1
platforms. If a given tier 1 platform has a TLS-capable toolchain then
sure - its only about a hundred lines of code to add support once the
toolchain support is there. Currently our toolchain only supports TLS on
i386 and ia64. I think that a binutils upgrade might fix amd64 but the
rest need a new compiler.

Right now, there is only one real application which absolutely needs TLS
and that is the NVidia OpenGL driver on i386. It looks like the DRM
people will start using TLS at some point but they aren't using it now.
If we reach 5.3 without any new toolchain support for TLS, I think we
should ship with TLS support on only i386 and ia64. It seems silly to
not support TLS on i386 (which people are begging for) because we can't
do it on sparc64 (which no-one needs).