Running Alien on Windows

 
Bouraqadi Noury wrote on pharo-dev
>We have trouble running alien on Windows. Starting from a clean pharo  
>1.0 image and the latest VM,

Would not work out of the box with the VM since it requires
VM changes. Marco ported them from Newspeak
and made them available [1]. Tests went green and
he is sucessfully using Alien on Windows. But it is not yet
in the official Squeak VM (which is 4.0.2.).

There is also an issue for pharo [2] and an issue for
VM developers [3] to follow progress.

So the code is there and is ready for integration.
Andreas asked for the license [4], Marco answered
that code was from Newspeak [5].

After that we got a good response from John McIntosh
on the license issue [6] which should be OK now.
(Dont know, I'm not a lawyer)

After I asked Andreas again he answered that it is not
highest priority for him which I understood since
Squeak 4.1 was in preparation. See last response
regarding this [7]

Dont know what should be the next steps to get Alien
into the Win32-VM code base. Maybe Andreas could tell
you more.

As a workaround you could use the source provided
by Marco to build your own unofficial VM - however
you would have to reintegrate anytime Andreas makes
a new release...

Bye
T.

[1] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-March/003983.html
[2] http://code.google.com/p/pharo/issues/detail?id=1360
[3] http://bugs.squeak.org/view.php?id=7475
[4] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-March/004034.html
[5] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-March/004037.html
[6] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-March/004054.html
[7] http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/vm-dev/2010-
March/004103.html

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Thanks torsten for the summary

>> Would not work out of the box with the VM since it requires
> VM changes. Marco ported them from Newspeak
> and made them available [1]. Tests went green and
> he is sucessfully using Alien on Windows. But it is not yet
> in the official Squeak VM (which is 4.0.2.).
>
> There is also an issue for pharo [2] and an issue for

I read [2] but I could not get what was needed from our side

May be I'm in a good mood but I think that andreas will do it when he got time.
I know what is losing time on a lot of tiny boring stuff that must be done.

 
Hi Torsten -

Thanks for cc-ing vm-dev; I wouldn't have seen this post otherwise. I've
actually looked at the code since and there's some good news here: It
appears that there's no actual modification of the Windows support code
necessary to use Alien. The only difference is a flag in sqWin32Window.c
which for all intents and purposes appears to be completely unused.

That leaves the question of how to deal with the patches to the VMMaker
code base. As you know, my "official" VMs are always built from the
"official" sources (i.e., the latest VMMaker package on
http://www.squeaksource.com/VMMaker.html) and if you'd like to help
getting Alien support into the standard builds we should figure out how
to integrate these patches.

Perhaps David and/or Eliot can help? From my perspective this issue
doesn't really belong with the Windows VM but rather with the VMMaker
package. I just build whatever is in there, so if Alien support is in,
then I'll build it together with everything else.

Cheers,
   - Andreas

On 4/20/2010 10:24 AM, Torsten Bergmann wrote:

 
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:23:36PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
Yes, I'll be glad to help. I'll look at it as soon as possible (probably
not until this weekend though).

Dave

 
On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 09:23:36PM -0700, Andreas Raab wrote:
I added Alien functions to VMMaker on SqueakSource:

  Name: VMMaker-dtl.170
  Author: dtl
  Time: 25 April 2010, 3:21:08.401 pm
  Ancestors: VMMaker-dtl.169
 
  VMMaker 4.1.0
 
  Include support for Alien FFI in the interpreter. This adds the contents of
  package Alien-VMMaker-Support from the Alien project on SqueakSource. The
  Alien plugin has not been included, and continues to be maintained in package
  Alien-VMMaker-Plugins on SqS/Alien.
 
  These additions are copyright and licensed as follows (reference SqS/Alien):
 
  Copyright 2008 Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Licensed under the Apache License,
  Version 2.0 (the ''License''); you may not use this file except in compliance
  with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at
  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0 Aug 27th, 2009

I also updated platforms/Cross/vm/sqVirtualMachine.[ch] with the Alien functions.
This bumps the VM_PROXY_MINOR version to 8, and requires that VMs be generated
with VMMaker-dtl.170 (or that you load the equivalent from the the Alien
project on SqueakSource).

I updated the configuration map so that "VMMaker updateFromServer" will now
pull in the Alien plugin. A similar update will be needed for ConfigurationOfVMMaker
for Pharo.

Note that this adds Apache licensed code to VMMaker. If there are any concerns
about this, please speak up.

Dave