FreeBSD/amd64 registerised running

[Simon Marlow]

Gregory Wright wrote:

> I have ghc-6.6 (darcs version from 20070405) running registerized on
> FreeBSD/amd64.  The FreeBSD version is 6.2.
> 
> The problem with the compiler crash turned out to be simple.  In the
> FreeBSD header file regex.h, regex_t is defined as
> 
> typedef struct {
>         int re_magic;
>         size_t re_nsub;         /* number of parenthesized 
> subexpressions */
>         __const char *re_endp;  /* end pointer for REG_PEND */
>         struct re_guts *re_g;   /* none of your business :-) */
> } regex_t;
> 
> The problem is that the "re_magic" field is defined as an int.  When 
> building
> the .hc files on the i386 host, the re_nsub field is at an offset of 4.  
> On the
> amd64 target, it is at an offset of 8.  In the ghc binding to the regex 
> functions,
> re_nsub is used to compute how much memory to allocate in a call to
> allocaBytes.  This leads to garbage being passed to newPinnedByteArray#.
> 
> The fix is to patch libraries/base/Text/Regex/Posix.hs on the amd64 target:
> 
> --- libraries/base/Text/Regex/Posix.hs.sav      Thu Apr  5 12:05:22 2007
> +++ libraries/base/Text/Regex/Posix.hs  Thu Apr  5 12:05:45 2007
> @@ -106,7 +106,7 @@
> regexec (Regex regex_fptr) str = do
>    withCString str $ \cstr -> do
>      withForeignPtr regex_fptr $ \regex_ptr -> do
> -      nsub <- ((\hsc_ptr -> peekByteOff hsc_ptr 4)) regex_ptr
> +      nsub <- ((\hsc_ptr -> peekByteOff hsc_ptr 8)) regex_ptr
> {-# LINE 109 "Posix.hsc" #-}
>        let nsub_int = fromIntegral (nsub :: CSize)
>        allocaBytes ((1 + nsub_int) * (16)) $ \p_match -> do
> 
> With this patch, we are pretty close.

Aha.  Text/Regex/Posix.hs is generated from Text/Regex/Posix.hsc by hsc2hs, but 
this is done on the *host* rather than the *target* when bootstrapping, and thus 
generates the wrong results.  If you'd run hsc2hs on the target, then 
Text/Regex/Posix.hs would have been correct, but you can't do this because 
hsc2hs is a Haskell program.  You could take the .c file generated by hsc2hs on 
the host and compile/run it on the target, but that's a hassle, so instead our 
policy is that we don't rely on any hsc2hs-generated code for bootstrapping.

Unfortunately I broke the rules by accident when I introduced the dependency on 
regex.  I can't think of an easy way to enforce the rule, at least at the 
moment, since there are other hsc2hs-processed modules that we happen to not 
depend on in GHC (System.Time and System.CPUTime).

This will be fixed as a side effect of 
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1160.  Also after the base reorg we 
might find we have no hsc2hs-generated code left in base and we can disable 
hsc2hs to prevent this happening again.

Cheers,
	Simon