Re: starting alpha releases

[PALI Gabor Janos <pgj@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 03:00:58PM +0100, Anil Madhavapeddy wrote:
> I'd like the kFreeBSD build bits to be integrated sooner rather than
> later [..], but I expect it will take some time for the
> backend to be [..] stable

Okay.

> 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.

I would try to avoid using any FP code because I think it is possible to do
so.  I have not met too many third-party packagesv only lwt, but it seemed to
be without FP code.  I will make the mirage website application build first
to see what modifications are actually needed.


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

That would be great!


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

:-)  Well, actually "abuse" would be proper word for our current usage.  We
just steal the ng_ether(4) hook in ether_input() -- while the pfil(9) hooks
provide us a natural way.  Stealing the ng_ether(4) hook also means that it
has to have an ether_output() hook, otherwise some of the assert() statements
will complain and stop the kernel.  So now I have an empty ether_output() hook
just because of this.


> I think we can merge the kFreeBSD BSD-Makefiles and OPAM reasonably well.

Sounds good, I will look into this.


> 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.

All right!