Re: alpha porting and errors
On Thu, May 20, 1999 at 10:44:59PM -0400, Luke N Shulenburger wrote:
[please keep your line length < 75 characters]
>I am interested in beginning to port software to the alpha platform.
>I have moderate C skills, but have no idea what to look for when porting a
>program.
>Can you direct me to a resource that would be sort of an alpha porting
>howto? that would be most helpful.
I don't know whether there is a Porting-HOWTO (would be definitely useful,
though).
One has primarily to look for misuse and abuse of (pointer) types. There is
too much software around, which thinks that
sizeof(int)=sizeof(long)=sizeof(void *)=4.
Otherwise, look for misaligned variables (but this is easier to say than to
find :)
David
>Also, I am having some problems with running software that has been compiled
>withe -mieee flag, whenever I run mpg123, some other software (notably the
>seti@home client) crashes with Floating point exceptions. Is this a
>consequence of using this flag, or does this indicate a problem with the
>applications that I am running.
I'guess it's the second. -mieee forces IEEE-compliant use of arithmetics;
a "Floating point exceptions" (SIGFPE) means that
1) a program did something which is not defined and
2) did not use a SIGFPE-handler.
David
--
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
-- Henry Spencer
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