Re: Plan needed for switching m68k to 32-bit alignment

On 11/13/24 7:54 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
>> Much as I appreciate Adrian's efforts to keep up with user space
>> development, I won't be in a position to help with an ABI change.
> Thanks, I will then just do it myself with brute force or drop the port.
>
> Adrian
>
Look at it philosophically.  One path is to dig in and try to change as 
little as possible to keep the oldest systems working.

The other is to do your best to adapt to keep the greatest relevant to 
modern development.

The former is the path (IMHO) towards eventual actions like m68k getting 
removed from the kernel entirely.  The latter encourages creative 
external efforts like the vampire with 68080 project. Which feeds 
current relevance and interest.

So just based on that I think I would want to follow the path that 
results in the most modern software compatibility which has the bonus of 
reducing friction with upstream developers.

This has been a thing in the Atari/freemint world.  Binutils dropped 
a.out support and the platform executable is a hybrid of a.out.  A 
clever developer has solved the issue by crafting a hybrid elf format 
that is still natively compatible.  This also inches the platform 
towards potential shared libraries and virtual memory.  This probably 
never would have happened if binutils didn't force the issue.

Fwiw, I love the idea of building with rust, llvm, etc for this 
platform.  Maybe the reality is that it will be a non-starter due to 
performance and memory requirements caused by the alignment.  I am not 
informed enough to judge that.

I'll be quiet again now ;)

Thanks,
Mark