Advice for testing PAC support
Hello debian-arm,
A while ago, I saw a message on debian-devel regarding PAC on ARM in
Debian. It caught my interest since I maintain a package
(storm-lang) that contains a JIT-compiler and garbage collector that
will be affected by the introduction of PAC in subtle ways.
I have made some patches that I *think* addresses these issues, but
I am currently unable to test them as I lack hardware with PAC
support (I have previously tested on a Raspberry Pi 4, but the SOC
lacks PAC).
As such, I am reaching out for advice regarding suitable ways of
verifying that my changes are correct. At the time I have two ideas:
- Use something like a QEMU chroot on an amd64 machine. As far
as I understand QEMU supports the PAC instruction if configured
correctly. Ideally it would be possible to use QEMU:s user-mode
emulation to avoid the hassle of setting up a "real" virtual
machine. I have seen messages about something similar on
debian-devel, but I fail to find instructions on how to set it
up in a convenient way. There is certainly good documentation
somewhere, if someone could point me in the right direction it
would be greatly appreciated!
- Find some comparatively cheap hardware with PAC support (e.g.
a single-board computer). Sadly, it is usually unclear whether
the SOC supports PAC or not. So far I have only found "high-end"
chips (like Snapdragon) with proper support, and those don't
seem to be used in what I imagine.
Since the freeze is relatively near, for the time being I have
disabled PAC for this package. So there is no rush for me to get
this fixed properly before the freeze.
Thank you for your advice!
Regards,
Filip Strömbäck
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