Re: starting alpha releases

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11 Sep 2012, at 14:10, PALI Gabor Janos <pgj@xxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi Anil,
> 
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 09:50:53AM +0100, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
>> Then, we can start merging in all the outstanding features for the first 
>> 'public' release, including:
>> 
>> - kFreeBSD backend (Gabor)
> 
> Is there an exact deadline for this?

Nope; I'd like the kFreeBSD build bits to be integrated sooner rather than
later (to avoid divergence), but I expect it will take some time for the
backend to be as stable as some of the other targets.
 
> I have not had the chance to put larger amount of stress on this backend,
> although it implements the mirage-os interfaces.  I was pondering perhaps
> I could test this with the mirage web site application.  I do not see too
> many obstacles except the eliminiation of use of floating-point numbers
> in the packages, but the devil is in the details.
> 
> Speaking of floating-point numbers: it is essentially a requirement to
> switch from real-valued time representation of OCaml to microseconds,
> otherwise we will not be able to merge the kFreeBSD backend.

The Mirage website would be ideal, but we will certainly need to think
harder about the floating point problem.  Getting rid of all the individual
cases is too fragile (especially when using third party library code).
Perhaps modifying the ocamlopt code generator to support soft-FP on x86
would appropriate.

The specific case of the timer should be easy enough to modify, however.
It's internally a uint64_t anyway.

> On the other hand, the FreeBSD pfil(9) hook interface has just been changed
> to support for link-layer filtering [1] so we can stop piggybacking on
> ng_ether(4).  If I had some time I could adapt my code to use this.
> 
> Note that my current code has a build solution different from OPAM, so it
> would require some effort to make fit with it.  I think this will be
> another thing we should be aware of.

Aww, I like netgraph! Fond memories of hacking on FreeBSD ATM with Dave Scott
back in 2003...

I think we can merge the kFreeBSD BSD-Makefiles and OPAM reasonably well.
I've almost got OPAM working under *BSD [1], and once that is working we
should be set to try a merge and get all of this into ports.

[1] https://github.com/OCamlPro/opam/issues/132

-anil