[HECnet] Trying to build SIMH from git (on OpenIndiana)

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 at 1:42 PM, Dave McGuire wrote:
On 03/13/2013 04:21 PM, Cory Smelosky wrote:
mkdir -p BIN
gcc -std=c99 -U__STRICT_ANSI__   -O2 -finline-functions
-fgcse-after-reload -fpredictive-commoning -fipa-cp-clone
-fno-unsafe-loop-optimizations -fno-strict-overflow -flto
-fwhole-program -Wno-unused-result   -I . -D_GNU_SOURCE
-DUSE_READER_THREAD -DSIM_ASYNCH_IO   -DHAVE_DLOPEN=so
sim_BuildROMs.c
-o BIN/BuildROMs
ld: fatal: auxiliary filter option (-f, --auxiliary) is only available
when building a shared object


  First of all, Cory...have you tried using Sun's compiler?   It kicks the snot out
of GCC for SPARC code generation.   I did give you a copy.

I would suggest that this would be a good idea.   

I have an old SparcStation which I fire up once every few years to test simh on a Big Endian platform.   It has a Linux disk and a Solaris disk (I don't recall the version).   I do not have a sun C compiler.   The last time I fired it up (more than a year ago) the basic testing worked out fine but I noticed that some things were so slow it was practically unusable.     I isolated some slow behavior down to an operation which walked across a 64MB chunk of VAX memory one byte at a time.   The 64MB array is stored in a single malloc'ed area.   This walk across the 64MB took some 20 seconds, while the same operation on my Windows desktop takes far less than any time I could measure on my watch.   My theory was that it was spending all of its time in the alignment trap handler, but I didn't have enough knowledge to dig into the details.

The test case is demonstrated by the following commands:

                    $ BIN/vax
                    MicroVAX 3900 simulator V4.0-0 Beta
                    sim> set cpu 64m
                    sim> save somefile         

The save operation writes the current simulator state to a file.

- Mark