*BSD support in 6.8.3

[Donn Cave]

On Fri, 30 May 2008 10:43:22 -0400
Gregory Wright <gwright at comcast.net> wrote:

> > http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/attachment/ticket/2013/2013.patch
> >
> > *BSD folks please test.
> >
> 
> I built the 20080529 snapshot with this patch and my light testing of  
> ghci
> showed no problems (FreeBSD 7.0/x86_64).

20080531 and NetBSD-amd64 4.0, not so good:

   GHCi, version 6.8.2.20080531: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
   Loading package base ... linking ... done.
   Bad system call (core dumped)

SIGSYS appears to happen in select(), is all I could get out of gdb.  Prior
to the patch, it was the usual error.

Otherwise, 20080531 seems to work as well as 6.8.2 release on NetBSD-amd64.
NetBSD defines ELF64_ST_TYPE and ELF64_ST_BIND.

Unfortunately, it won't build with the GNU "ar" that's standard on this
platform.  It can't index archives as big as libHSbase.a:  apparently, it
allocates too many moderately large hash tables for the many small modules
in that archive, and runs out of memory.  I worked around this by reducing
the default hash table size in libbfd.so.  I'm not saying any of this makes
sense, it's just what I eventually managed to get working.  Otherwise, it
builds smoothly.

-- 
Donn Cave <donn at avvanta.com>