Arla on Linux/Alpha

[Chris Wing]

Hi. I recently installed Linux on an Alpha system and thought I would try
out Arla. I am pleased to note that Arla is working quite flawlessly on
the Alpha so far!

There were a few compiler warnings about casting between pointers and ints
of different size; none look dangerous and I'll go over them in a future
e-mail to the list.

I'm using Red Hat Linux 6.0 on the Alpha, in other words, Linux 2.2.5.
Apparently, Linux (2.2?) on the Alpha uses register 8 to store the current
task pointer, which necessitates using -ffixed-8 when compiling all kernel
code; the following quick hack was needed to get xfs to compile:


diff -uNr arla-0.26.orig/xfs/linux/Makefile.in arla-0.26/xfs/linux/Makefile.in
--- arla-0.26.orig/xfs/linux/Makefile.in	Sat Jan  2 00:46:39 1999
+++ arla-0.26/xfs/linux/Makefile.in	Tue Aug  3 11:36:31 1999
@@ -33,7 +33,7 @@
 		  -I../../include \
 		  -I$(srcdir)/../../include
 INCLUDES	= $(INC) @KRB_INC_FLAGS@
-CFLAGS		= @CFLAGS@ -g -I. $(INCLUDES) -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer
+CFLAGS		= @CFLAGS@ -g -I. $(INCLUDES) -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -O2 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffixed-8
 
 MODULE		= xfs.o


(obviously, this should be put into autoconf so that configure adds
-ffixed-8 to CFLAGS for xfs, when compiling on Linux/Alpha-- but I haven't
done that yet, sorry...)

The compiler I'm using is egcs-1.1.2; I'm not sure if -ffixed will work on
others. (but if you are using Linux on the Alpha you are probably using
egcs anyway)

Thanks,

Chris Wing
wingc at engin.umich.edu