[CentOS-devel] ATTN: OCaml 4.04 in Rawhide, could affect POWER, s/390, RHEL 7.4, CentOS 7.4

Richard W.M. Jones

rjones at redhat.com
Tue Nov 8 09:06:58 UTC 2016


On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 02:04:22PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> OCaml 4.03 has been out for a while.

Since OCaml 4.04.0 was released last Friday, we rebased to 4.04.0.

This is now ready to test.  If you have Rawhide + some package that
needs OCaml, then add the following repository and you can pull down
the new OCaml version to test against:

$ cat /etc/yum.repos.d/tmp-f26-ocaml.repo
[f26-ocaml]
name=f26-ocaml
baseurl=https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/repos/f26-ocaml/latest/$basearch/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=0

> A few issues that may affect people:
> 
> (1) There is a new ppc backend upstream, and I intend to switch to this.
> 
> For years we have maintained our own out-of-tree ppc64 & ppc64le
> backends.  I want to switch to the upstream ppc backend (which
> supports, in theory, ppc 32 bit, ppc64 and ppc64le).  However when I
> actually tried this I found it to be rather buggy, it couldn't even
> compile many basic OCaml packages.  This time I intend to switch, and
> we'll deal with the bugs.

The good news is that the new POWER backend in 4.04 is very stable.
We haven't found any problems at all, and compiling for ppc64le
actually revealed undefined behaviour in a C library:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1392247#c3

For ppc64le you will require POWER8.  Running on POWER7 will cause
random segfaults because various vector instructions are used that
weren't available in POWER7.

> (2) There is a new s/390x backend upstream.  This should enable us to
> compile all s/390x packages as native code.
> 
> It also means that all supported architectures (yes, even riscv64)
> will support native compilation for OCaml.

Neither s390x nor riscv64 are enabled at the moment, but I hope to get
that done in the next few days or weeks.

Rich.

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