Cincom Smalltalk + glibc-2.4 == hang 6

Posted by Christopher Smith Mon, 11 Sep 2006 05:22:00 GMT

So, all this Ruby-ing has made me yearn for Smalltalk. Accordingly, I started trolling for Smalltalk implementations. Squeak is working well as always, but Cincom is available for free, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Just one catch: Cincom’s VM appears to rely on Linuxthreads, and won’t work on NPTL. This is a pitty as the latest glibc (2.4) no longer supports Linuxthreads.

One more cheer for open source software!

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  1. problem isVisualWorks ifFalse: [Gentoo] Xblog
    After posting about my problems getting Cincom Smalltalk to work on my Gentoo system, I recevied an impressive amount of help. Aside from my friend the committed Smalltalker, I also received help from Isaac Gouy (who was able to quickly demonstrat...
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  1. Isaac Gouy 4 days later:

    What have you done to identify the problem you’re having?
    Have you asked about it on comp.lang.smalltalk or on the vwnc mailing list?

    I have glibc-2.4 installed. Here’s an example of VW7.4 working with glibc-2.4-r3

    Maybe you’ve mis-diagnosed whatever problem you’re having and hastily broadcast your bad assumption to the world.

  2. Christopher Smith 5 days later:

    Issac:

    Thanks for the suggestions. I actually have a friend who is chasing this one down. Just out of curiosity, does your system have /lib/tls? If so, your runtime problably has a patched glibc with support for LinuxThreads. If not, then the plot does thicken.

  3. Isaac Gouy 5 days later:

    ls: /lib/tls: No such file or directory

    Have you checked ReleaseNotes7.4.pdf in the vw doc directory?
    “Linux Startup Issue on X.org X11 Installations”

    Have you checked Top installation issues with VisualWorks 7
    “Issue: Out of memory error when starting the install image under Linux”

  4. Christopher Smith 6 days later:

    Isaac Gouy: I did try all the font stuff, including using a big heap. So far, no dice. The strace shows the image is constantly mmap’ing anonymous memory, and then at some point unmmap’ing it and then starting over again.

    In general, the Cincom docs seema little out of date. They seemed to mention much badness vis-a-vis NPTL, which was why I assumed that was the problem (that and the fact that it works just fine on my RHEL4 system that still has support for LinuxThreads).

  5. Isaac Gouy 6 days later:

    Post the gory details on the vwnc mailing list

  6. James Robertson 20 days later:

    Hi, I’m the product manager for Cincom Smalltalk. Could you send me as many details as you have on this? If you have a core file, would it be possible to gzip it and push it to an ftp server?

    Thanks

    James Robertson jrobertson@cincom.com

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