ghc-6.6.1 for FreeBSD/amd64 binary distribution

[Simon Marlow]

Gregory Wright wrote:

> I have put a binary distribution of ghc-6.6.1 for FreeBSD/amd64
> at
> 
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6.1/ghc-6.6.1-x86_64-unknown-freebsd.tar.bz2 

yay!  Ian will supply a link from the download page in due course, I'm sure.

> No documentation or ghci.  The former might be easily remedied although
> using FreeBSD's docbook chain, as suggested in the wiki, fails when asked
> to generate printable docs. The latter seems to be a bigger project 
> since my
> naive interpretation of the problem is that we need data relocations across
> a 2GB boundary.

The x86-64 (or amd64 if you like) Linux port doesn't do relocation of data 
references outside 2Gb.  It is the subject of this bug:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/781

the underlying problem is that the relocatable reference is only 32 bits, 
because we're working in the small memory model, but the address of the symbol 
might be outside the current 2Gb slice, because it's in a shared library 
somewhere.  The system linker solves this by relocating the data itself from the 
shared library into the main program's 2Gb slice (I think), but we can't do this 
in GHCi.

Fortunately most code doesn't reference static data from shared libraries, so we 
get away with it most of the time.

Cheers,
	Simon