[porting omniORB2 to VxWorks]

Sai-Lai Lo S.Lo@orl.co.uk
Tue, 6 Jan 1998 16:56:36 GMT


>>>>> Fadi Nasser writes:

> Dear Sir or Madam:
> 	I just read your posting to OmniOrb2 mailing list, and was wondering
> if the problems with porting OmniOrb2 to VxWorks have been solved yet??
> I am currently attempting the same task, and would greatly appreciate any
> pointers in this regards (especially if the port exsists already:-)) ).

Several people have asked about the VxWorks port. The main issue is
the compiler rather than omniORB2 itself. 

The gcc compiler does not have exception support before 2.7.2. Even with
2.7.2 the exception handling is strictly speaking non-thread safe.
This is the main show stopper.

Recently, egcs-1.0 comes out which is a major improvement from gcc
2.7.2. However the stock egcs-1.0 still does not have thread safe exception
handling. The good news is that there is a patch available to make egcs-1.0
generates thread-safe exception handling code. I have successfully used the
patched egcs-1.0 on x86 Linux and alpha Linux (both of which with the
Redhat 5.0 distribution). Please see the release notes of snapshot_971224 for
details.


I think there is a chance that someone has already done a port of egcs-1.0
to become a cross compiler for VxWorks. And better still have applied the
thread-safe exception handling patch. It is worth finding that out on the
egcs mailing list. (Can anyone shed some light on this?)

There is also the suggestion of changing omniORB2 to generate the IDL mapping
without exception handling. This is a non-trivial task. The runtime makes
extensive use of C++ exception mechanism to ensure resources are released
properly during error recovery.


Regards,

Sai-Lai (Mr)

-- 
Dr. Sai-Lai Lo                          |       Research Scientist
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