PowerPC64 Port

The PowerPC64 port is in some sort of early beta-stage. It started as entry for the Linux On Power contest.

This page contains only a rough outline of what is working and especially what not, more information later.

Status

• 2.1.x compiler support
• Supports POWER4 and derivative (G5) for Linux at the moment.
• Base RTL units and compiler is cycling fine.

Building

Since it's beta, with some slight bugs, only the knowledgeable and interested people should try it. As usual, if you do not have a G5, you need crossbinutils for linux-ppc64.

The target is called "powerpc64", so a "make PPC_TARGET=powerpc64" or "make PPC_TARGET=powerpc64-linux" if you are not running Linux, should do the trick.

Issues

• -Or is currently broken
• Exception handling does not seem to work, there is an issue with the sigaction() call (signal handlers fail to register).
• object messages do not work. This is an alignment problem of generated internal structures.
• there are some problems with packages/FCL due to missing workaround for non-aligned accesses in some records. A workaround for this (instruction) limitation is being worked on.
• performance is really bad. Programs compiled with the ppc32 compiler are much faster, and the same program on a slower clocked x86_32 dances circles around both. Note that regularly compiled programs for the powerpc32 platform do NOT work on POWER and G5s on Linux at the moment.
• in general, the compiler needs more testing.

Of course, all of this (except maybe the performance part :-) will be fixed for an "official" release.

Contacts

Message to the fpc-devel mailing list, or look for "tom_at_work" in the IRC channel (or of course discuss it here).