Re: Privilege Levels Below User

Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> writes:

On Fri, 14 Jun 2024 22:10:23 -0000 (UTC), Thomas Koenig wrote:

It's not quite that simple - if you try to build a modern web brower for
POWER on Linux, for example, you're in for quite an adventure.

>
Endianness assumptions?

OpenPower is little-endian, so I doubt that this is the reason.  From
what I read, Web browsers are a beast to build.

I think essentially all of the basic toolchain is
already available, so what’s left would be mostly bugs in the app code
itself.

There's a huge difference between what application maintainers
consider bugs in application code and what the C and C++ compiler
maintainers do.

For which I’m sure they would accept patches.

Who would write them?  I have posed a challenge to advocates of
undefined behaviour as the way to efficiency in
<2017Aug18.152854@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:

|Write a proof-of-concept Forth interpreter in the language you
|advocate that runs at least one of bubble-sort, matrix-mult or sieve
|from bench/forth in
|<http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/forth/bench.zip>

Nobody has risen to the challenge, much less submitted patches to
convert Gforth to the kind of C code that gcc officially supports.

Fortunately, the practice is quite a bit better than what the
advocates threaten, so Gforth builds nicely on RISC-V, and, last I
tried it, on Power.

- anton
--
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>