gnat on debian arm

gnat on debian arm

[tonyg]

Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its status?

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

tonyg <tonythegair@gmail.com> writes:
> Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its status?

Fully ported to armel (this is ARM in little-endian mode).

Not ported yet to armhf (this is ARM with hardware floating-point).

This is true of both gnat-4.4 and gnat-4.6.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[tonyg]

On Mar 9, 6:00 pm, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
> tonyg <tonytheg...@gmail.com> writes:
> > Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its status?
>
> Fully ported to armel (this is ARM in little-endian mode).
>
> Not ported yet to armhf (this is ARM with hardware floating-point).
>
> This is true of both gnat-4.4 and gnat-4.6.
>
> --
> Ludovic Brenta.

Ah cool, I guess I better go find out what little endian is, before I
eventually get a raspberry pi!

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Simon Wright]

tonyg <tonythegair@gmail.com> writes:

> On Mar 9, 6:00 pm, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>> tonyg <tonytheg...@gmail.com> writes:
>> > Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its status?
>>
>> Fully ported to armel (this is ARM in little-endian mode).
>>
>> Not ported yet to armhf (this is ARM with hardware floating-point).
>>
>> This is true of both gnat-4.4 and gnat-4.6.
>>
>> --
>> Ludovic Brenta.
>
> Ah cool, I guess I better go find out what little endian is, before I
> eventually get a raspberry pi!

Unless you've been using a Powerbook you've probably been using
little-endian all along. Rather like Monsieur Jourdain.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

tonyg wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> On Mar 9, 6:00 pm, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
>> tonyg wrote on comp.lang.ada:
>>> Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its
>>> status?
>>
>> Fully ported to armel (this is ARM in little-endian mode).
>>
>> Not ported yet to armhf (this is ARM with hardware floating-point).
>>
>> This is true of both gnat-4.4 and gnat-4.6.
> 
> Ah cool, I guess I better go find out what little endian is, before
> I eventually get a raspberry pi!

Interesting thread, very informative, starting at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2012/03/msg00002.html.

The Raspbery Pi uses an ARMv6 processor running in little-endian
mode (ARM supports both big-endian and little-endian modes) with
hardware floating point.  This is quite a unique combination;
processors with hardware floating point are usually ARMv7; the
armhf port of Debian requires ARMv7.

Debian armel works on the Raspberry Pi but does not take advantage
of the floating point hardware.  Note that if you're going to
program in Ada on such a machine, you might find that 256 MiB
of RAM is very limited. You probably don't want gnat-gps or emacs
as your IDE on such a machine.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

Simon Wright wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> tonyg wrote on comp.lang.ada:
>> Ah cool, I guess I better go find out what little endian is, before
>> I eventually get a raspberry pi!
> 
> Unless you've been using a Powerbook you've probably been using
> little-endian all along. Rather like Monsieur Jourdain.

Actually the PowerPC is a bad example because, just like ARM and MIPS,
it supports both modes :) Good examples would be m68k and SPARC v8
which are big-endian only (v9 is big-endian too but can access memory
on little-endian buses like PCI).

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Simon Wright]

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> Actually the PowerPC is a bad example because, just like ARM and MIPS,
> it supports both modes

But most often it's b-e, and certainly in the case of the Power*Book* it
is. Was.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Georg Bauhaus]

On 13.03.12 15:13, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Note that if you're going to
> program in Ada on such a machine, you might find that 256 MiB
> of RAM is very limited. You probably don't want gnat-gps or emacs
> as your IDE on such a machine.
> 

I had thought that 256 MiB is plenty of RAM for editing text
and running a compiler.  Editing without a "GUI" using a capable
text editor, including Emacs, should well be possible.

256 MiB is about the amount of RAM that were supposedly necessary
to _translate_ a compiler for some O-O language in the early 1990s.
But I am sure I was happily running Editors, including Emacs,
in a lot less than that. In fact, I didn't know anyone who had
access to a computer with such an amount of RAM.

Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM
went rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Shark8]

On Tuesday, March 13, 2012 11:36:27 AM UTC-5, Georg Bauhaus wrote:
> 
> Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM
> went rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

Probably not; one of my friends is a big fan of OS/2 and its design, which he probably wouldn't be if it didn't run smoothly.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Randy Brukardt]

"Georg Bauhaus" <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> wrote in message 
news:4f5f778c$0$6555$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...
> On 13.03.12 15:13, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> Note that if you're going to
>> program in Ada on such a machine, you might find that 256 MiB
>> of RAM is very limited. You probably don't want gnat-gps or emacs
>> as your IDE on such a machine.
>>
>
> I had thought that 256 MiB is plenty of RAM for editing text
> and running a compiler.  Editing without a "GUI" using a capable
> text editor, including Emacs, should well be possible.
>
> 256 MiB is about the amount of RAM that were supposedly necessary
> to _translate_ a compiler for some O-O language in the early 1990s.
> But I am sure I was happily running Editors, including Emacs,
> in a lot less than that. In fact, I didn't know anyone who had
> access to a computer with such an amount of RAM.
>
> Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM
> went rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

I think your memory of memory is fine. :-) The original version of Janus/Ada 
worked fine on a 48K Z-80 machine (just a subset of Ada, though).

The first validated (Ada 83) version was for original 640K IBM PCs. Even 
today, the memory footprint of Janus/Ada never exceeds 16Mb.

Claw programs are "huge" by our standards, but they too tend to have a 
footprint in the 16Mb range. So 256MB would be plenty for program 
development (depending on the OS size; we might only use 32MB but Windows of 
course uses a heck of a lot more).

                                          Randy. 

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

Randy Brukardt writes on comp.lang.ada:
> Georg Bauhaus wrote in message 
> news:4f5f778c$0$6555$9b4e6d93@newsspool4.arcor-online.net...
>> On 13.03.12 15:13, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>>> Note that if you're going to program in Ada on such a machine, you
>>> might find that 256 MiB of RAM is very limited. You probably don't
>>> want gnat-gps or emacs as your IDE on such a machine.
>>
>> I had thought that 256 MiB is plenty of RAM for editing text and
>> running a compiler.  Editing without a "GUI" using a capable text
>> editor, including Emacs, should well be possible.

Maybe I'm biased towards large-scale development.  I have fond memories
of my old IBM ThinkPad T22 with 256 MiB RAM and a Pentium III processor
running at 900 MHz.  The performance of that machine should be quite
similar to that of a modern Raspberry Pi.  Compiling gnat 3.15p (400
kSLOC C, 300 kSLOC Ada) on that machine was OK but when I started work
on GCC 4.1 (2.6 MSLOC), a three-stage bootstrap with tests took an
entire night.  And building the other large package, gnat-gps, took 220
minutes on that machine and 17 minutes on its successor which is stil my
current machine[1].  Most of the difference was due to the increase in
RAM (256 MiB to 2 GiB).

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?msg=100;bug=393636

>> 256 MiB is about the amount of RAM that were supposedly necessary to
>> _translate_ a compiler for some O-O language in the early 1990s.  But
>> I am sure I was happily running Editors, including Emacs, in a lot
>> less than that. In fact, I didn't know anyone who had access to a
>> computer with such an amount of RAM.
>>
>> Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM went
>> rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

Oh, you're bringing memories back... I started running OS/2 2.0 when it
was released on 4 MiB (very slow) and upgraded my machine to 8
(okay-ish) then 12 then 24 MiB, which *was* smooth.  Yes, the
architecture was quite good and I was also a fan :)

I feel like a dinosaur now :)

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Rolf]

On 13 Mrz., 15:13, Ludovic Brenta <ludo...@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:
> Debian armel works on the Raspberry Pi but does not take advantage
> of the floating point hardware.  Note that if you're going to
> program in Ada on such a machine, you might find that 256 MiB
> of RAM is very limited. You probably don't want gnat-gps or emacs
> as your IDE on such a machine.

I run Debian armel on a Seagate Dockstar [1] with only 128MB RAM. It
was sold in 2010 for around 20€, unfortunately it isn't available
anymore.  Emacs runs just fine on that machine. And I remember that I
once bootstrapped gcc (4.6.x?) on it (all three stages, no test runs,
>> 1 day)

    Rolf

[1] http://ahsoftware.de/dockstar/

Re: gnat on debian arm

[tonyg]

On Mar 13, 4:36 pm, Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauh...@futureapps.de>
wrote:
> On 13.03.12 15:13, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>
> > Note that if you're going to
> > program in Ada on such a machine, you might find that 256 MiB
> > of RAM is very limited. You probably don't want gnat-gps or emacs
> > as your IDE on such a machine.
>
> I had thought that 256 MiB is plenty of RAM for editing text
> and running a compiler.  Editing without a "GUI" using a capable
> text editor, including Emacs, should well be possible.
>
> 256 MiB is about the amount of RAM that were supposedly necessary
> to _translate_ a compiler for some O-O language in the early 1990s.
> But I am sure I was happily running Editors, including Emacs,
> in a lot less than that. In fact, I didn't know anyone who had
> access to a computer with such an amount of RAM.
>
> Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM
> went rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

I intend no development on the Pi. Just a little compilation and
execution. In fact if I can get away with no compilation on the pi , I
will be even happier.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Álex R. Mosteo]

Georg Bauhaus wrote:

> On 13.03.12 15:13, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
>> Note that if you're going to
>> program in Ada on such a machine, you might find that 256 MiB
>> of RAM is very limited. You probably don't want gnat-gps or emacs
>> as your IDE on such a machine.
>> 
> 
> I had thought that 256 MiB is plenty of RAM for editing text
> and running a compiler.  Editing without a "GUI" using a capable
> text editor, including Emacs, should well be possible.

I had the impression that recent gcc versions are quite memory hungry (when 
doing optimization?). Also particularly gnat when compiling generics. I 
might be wrong though.

> 256 MiB is about the amount of RAM that were supposedly necessary
> to _translate_ a compiler for some O-O language in the early 1990s.
> But I am sure I was happily running Editors, including Emacs,
> in a lot less than that. In fact, I didn't know anyone who had
> access to a computer with such an amount of RAM.
> 
> Running OS/2 on a PCs equipped with that "limited" amount of RAM
> went rather smoothly, or is my memory blurred?

GNAT on Raspberry Pi (Was: gnat on debian arm)

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

Tonyg <tonythegair@gmail.com> writes:

> Ah cool, I guess I better go find out what little endian is, before I
> eventually get a raspberry pi!

Basic text I/O and tasking works fine with the Debian GNAT package on
Raspberry Pi.  (I just tested on the real thing a few minutes ago.)

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"How may I be honest with you today?"

Re: GNAT on Raspberry Pi (Was: gnat on debian arm)

[BrianG]

On 04/17/2012 03:15 PM, Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:
> Tonyg<tonythegair@gmail.com>  writes:
>
>> Ah cool, I guess I better go find out what little endian is, before I
>> eventually get a raspberry pi!
>
> Basic text I/O and tasking works fine with the Debian GNAT package on
> Raspberry Pi.  (I just tested on the real thing a few minutes ago.)
>
> Greetings,
>
> Jacob
Great, thanks.  Now I need to get me one, or several.

-- 
---
BrianG
000
@[Google's email domain]
.com

Re: GNAT on Raspberry Pi

[Jacob Sparre Andersen]

I wrote:

> Basic text I/O and tasking works fine with the Debian GNAT package on
> Raspberry Pi.  (I just tested on the real thing a few minutes ago.)

I've compiled and tested various old Ada applications of mine on a
Raspberry Pi running Debian/stable.  Use of tasking, text I/O, random
numbers, floating point calculations and the POSIX Ada API has been
tested.  So far I haven't found any problems.

Greetings,

Jacob
-- 
"The universe isn't for the likes of me to understand. I only work here."

Re: GNAT on Raspberry Pi

[Álex R. Mosteo]

Jacob Sparre Andersen wrote:

> I wrote:
> 
>> Basic text I/O and tasking works fine with the Debian GNAT package on
>> Raspberry Pi.  (I just tested on the real thing a few minutes ago.)
> 
> I've compiled and tested various old Ada applications of mine on a
> Raspberry Pi running Debian/stable.  Use of tasking, text I/O, random
> numbers, floating point calculations and the POSIX Ada API has been
> tested.  So far I haven't found any problems.

That's great news, thanks for the report!

Alex.

> 
> Greetings,
> 
> Jacob

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Lucretia]

On Friday, March 9, 2012 4:19:26 PM UTC, tonyg wrote:
> Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its status?

Well, yeah, but no, but, is the best answer.

Debian ARM is actually arm-eabi, The current ARM GNAT's exception handling uses SJLJ which is not part of the EABI standard; the standard uses ZCX in DWARF2 tables, which has not been ported to ARM yet, I've tried and got stuck/confused.

Thanks,
Luke.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

Lucretia wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> tonyg wrote:
>> Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its
>> status?
> 
> Well, yeah, but no, but, is the best answer.
> 
> Debian ARM is actually arm-eabi, The current ARM GNAT's exception
> handling uses SJLJ which is not part of the EABI standard; the
> standard uses ZCX in DWARF2 tables, which has not been ported to
> ARM yet, I've tried and got stuck/confused.

IIUC, that means that pure Ada programs work perfectly well but that
exceptions cannot cross language boundaries, i.e. if your Ada program
uses some C++ library that raises exceptions, then you cannot handle
the exception in Ada?  Big deal.

Otherwise, could you please elaborate on what you mean by
"stuck/confused"?

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Lucretia]

On Wednesday, April 25, 2012 4:48:52 PM UTC+1, Ludovic Brenta wrote:
> Lucretia wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> > tonyg wrote:
> >> Does anyone know if gnat is fully ported to debian ARM and its
> >> status?
> > 
> > Well, yeah, but no, but, is the best answer.
> > 
> > Debian ARM is actually arm-eabi, The current ARM GNAT's exception
> > handling uses SJLJ which is not part of the EABI standard; the
> > standard uses ZCX in DWARF2 tables, which has not been ported to
> > ARM yet, I've tried and got stuck/confused.
> 
> IIUC, that means that pure Ada programs work perfectly well but that
> exceptions cannot cross language boundaries, i.e. if your Ada program
> uses some C++ library that raises exceptions, then you cannot handle
> the exception in Ada?  Big deal.

It'll be slower than ZCX as well, that is a big deal.

> Otherwise, could you please elaborate on what you mean by
> "stuck/confused"?

Ever looked at the exception code? Understand the exception tables? Nope, me neither.

I posted a patch to gcc ml with my progress a while back, it works to a point, but there needs to be code to set up the actual ARM exception also. I just got confused with it all tbh.

Luke.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[roderick.chapman]

My Raspberry Pi arrived this morning, so a port of the SPARK Examiner might be on the cards next... :-)
 - Rod 

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

Roderick Chapman wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> My Raspberry Pi arrived this morning, so a port of the SPARK
> Examiner might be on the cards next... :-)

Already done IIUC, simply say:

aptitude install spark

on Debian testing or unstable on your Raspberry Pi

:)

--
Ludovic Brenta.

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Tero Koskinen]

Hi,

On Wed, 30 May 2012 06:53:40 -0700 (PDT)
Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> wrote:

> Roderick Chapman wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> > My Raspberry Pi arrived this morning, so a port of the SPARK
> > Examiner might be on the cards next... :-)
> 
> Already done IIUC, simply say:
> 
> aptitude install spark
> 
> on Debian testing or unstable on your Raspberry Pi

Spark does not seem to work on my Gumstix Overo with Debian sid/armhf:
[15:54 gumstix:21] ~/tmp/s 
% file /usr/bin/spark
/usr/bin/spark: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.26, BuildID[sha1]=0x78a4a2b6adb64112268ce9ad41bdc0b29b7527ff, stripped
[15:54 gumstix:22] ~/tmp/s 
% spark
zsh: killed     spark
[15:55 gumstix:23] ~/tmp/s 
% gdb spark
GNU gdb (GDB) 7.4.1-debian
Copyright (C) 2012 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.  Type "show copying"
and "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "arm-linux-gnueabihf".
For bug reporting instructions, please see:
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/bugs/>...
Reading symbols from /usr/bin/spark...(no debugging symbols found)...done.
(gdb) run
Starting program: /usr/bin/spark 
During startup program terminated with signal SIGKILL, Killed.
(gdb) start
Function "main" not defined.
Make breakpoint pending on future shared library load? (y or [n]) y

Temporary breakpoint 1 (main) pending.
Starting program: /usr/bin/spark 
During startup program terminated with signal SIGKILL, Killed.
(gdb)

% apt-cache show spark
Package: spark
Version: 2011.0.deb-5
Installed-Size: 6161
Maintainer: Євгеній Мещеряков <eugen@debian.org>
Architecture: armhf
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.13-28), libgcc1 (>= 1:4.4.0), libgmp10, libgnat-4.6 (>= 4.6.3-3), libstdc++6 (>= 4.4.0), swi-prolog-nox (>= 5.10.4~)
Suggests: gnat, alt-ergo
Description-en: SPARK programming language toolset
 SPARK is a formally-defined computer programming language based on the
 Ada programming language, intended to be secure and to support the
 development of high integrity software used in applications and systems
 where predictable and highly reliable operation is essential either for
 reasons of safety or for business integrity.
 .
 This package contains the tools necessary for checking if programs adhere
 to the SPARK rules and the tools to show freedom of runtime exceptions in
 those programs. To compile SPARK programs use any standards-compliant Ada
 compiler, such as GNAT.
Homepage: http://libre.adacore.com/libre/tools/spark-gpl-edition/
Description-md5: 0512d6610268f233b9345bda401dbf34
Tag: devel::lang:ada, implemented-in::ada, interface::commandline,
 role::program, works-with::software:source
Section: devel
Priority: optional
Filename: pool/main/s/spark/spark_2011.0.deb-5_armhf.deb
Size: 2550856
MD5sum: fc2d4f2ff3e0fea69fbd57a0be9b18c8
SHA1: ed3622e1f1cb4d493e43193cbe10ff7b4ed83483
SHA256: 67f3ed2d7bb4a3f6aae1520dd0f5c05376d446b0d8d00e7700de85b09d360324

[15:56 gumstix:25] ~/tmp/s 
% 


'checker' works:

[15:56 gumstix:25] ~/tmp/s 
% checker
SPARK Proof Checker GPL 2011
Copyright (C) 2011 Altran Praxis Limited, Bath, U.K.



Please type filename, without extension, in lowercase, within single
quotes if it is not in this directory, followed by a full-stop.
FILENAME.vcg and FILENAME.fdl will be read.
Filename? abc.

No .vcg file of this name exists.

List of .vcg files in current region:
       <THERE ARE NONE>Please try again.

Please type filename, without extension, in lowercase, within single
quotes if it is not in this directory, followed by a full-stop.
FILENAME.vcg and FILENAME.fdl will be read.
Filename? .

errorStream user_input:10:18 Syntax error: Unexpected end of clause
 


-- 
Tero Koskinen - http://iki.fi/tero.koskinen/

Re: gnat on debian arm

[Ludovic Brenta]

Tero Koskinen wrote on comp.lang.ada:
> Spark does not seem to work on my Gumstix Overo with
> Debian sid/armhf:
[...]
> % gdb spark
[...]
> (gdb) run
> Starting program: /usr/bin/spark
> During startup program terminated with signal
> SIGKILL, Killed.

Does it work on armel (as opposed to armhf)?

I reported this problem to the spark maintainer,
please followup at http://bugs.debian.org/675385.

--
Ludovic Brenta.