Category Archives: gcc

Did you know that GCC used to support Windows NT ?

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I’m not talking about MingGW, Cygwin or anything else like that, but rather when support for Windows NT first appeared, it had to be compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ 1.0 of all things.

It was back in the 2.6 days of GCC, right before the stagnation that led to EGCS.

`i[345]86-*-winnt3.5'
     This version requires a GAS that has not yet been released.  Until
     it is, you can get a prebuilt binary version via anonymous ftp from
     `cs.washington.edu:pub/gnat' or `cs.nyu.edu:pub/gnat'. You must
     also use the Microsoft header files from the Windows NT 3.5 SDK.
     Find these on the CDROM in the `/mstools/h' directory dated
     9/4/94.  You must use a fixed version of Microsoft linker made
     especially for NT 3.5, which is also is available on the NT 3.5
     SDK CDROM.  If you do not have this linker, can you also use the
     linker from Visual C/C++ 1.0 or 2.0.

     Installing GNU CC for NT builds a wrapper linker, called `ld.exe',
     which mimics the behaviour of Unix `ld' in the specification of
     libraries (`-L' and `-l').  `ld.exe' looks for both Unix and
     Microsoft named libraries.  For example, if you specify `-lfoo',
     `ld.exe' will look first for `libfoo.a' and then for `foo.lib'.

     You may install GNU CC for Windows NT in one of two ways,
     depending on whether or not you have a Unix-like shell and various
     Unix-like utilities.

       1. If you do not have a Unix-like shell and few Unix-like
          utilities, you will use a DOS style batch script called
          `configure.bat'.  Invoke it as `configure winnt' from an
          MSDOS console window or from the program manager dialog box.
          `configure.bat' assumes you have already installed and have
          in your path a Unix-like `sed' program which is used to
          create a working `Makefile' from `Makefile.in'.

          `Makefile' uses the Microsoft Nmake program maintenance
          utility and the Visual C/C++ V8.00 compiler to build GNU CC.
          You need only have the utilities `sed' and `touch' to use
          this installation method, which only automatically builds the
          compiler itself.  You must then examine what `fixinc.winnt'
          does, edit the header files by hand and build `libgcc.a'
          manually.

       2. The second type of installation assumes you are running a
          Unix-like shell, have a complete suite of Unix-like utilities
          in your path, and have a previous version of GNU CC already
          installed, either through building it via the above
          installation method or acquiring a pre-built binary.  In this
          case, use the `configure' script in the normal fashion.

Well, that is quite the tall order!  I can’t believe I somehow managed to build it back then, and out of curiosity I managed to build it again.  And as you can see you need a ‘beta’ release of the GAS assembler, which is kind of impossible to find now, but it was part of the GNAT project, which used to distribute binary builds of the GCC core back in the day.  Luckily, I have a version stuffed away, although it’s from GCC 2.8.1, not as ancient as it would have when GCC 2.6 was a new thing.   But it at least assembles enough for my simple Hello World experiment.

To build GCC you need a working SED, which surprisingly CL 8.0 from the Win32s SDK, and it runs fine on Windows 7 x64 of all things.  I had to mess with some of the files, and substitute the linker & headder files from Visual C++ 2.0 but much to my amazement not only can I build GCC along with libgcc.a, it also builds incredibly fast.  On my machine I can compile GCC in about 5 seconds. Â I remember in 1995 building this on Windows 95 (I was crazy) and it is taking HOURS and HOURS.

So, one nice thing about these binaries is that you don’t need any external DLL’s  Even the import section of a simple hello world exe is tiny:

GetVersion GetEnvironmentStrings GetCommandLineA ExitProcess RtlUnwind UnhandledExceptionFilter GetModuleFileNameA GetFileType GetStdHandle GetStartupInfoA VirtualFree VirtualAlloc WriteFile WideCharToMultiByte GetLastError FlushFileBuffers SetFilePointer SetStdHandle CloseHandle KERNEL32.dll

Which implies that it only needs KERNEL32 to function.

I don’t know if it’s of any use to anyone else, but HERE is my dump of all the source and tools I used to build GCC.

Saving RISC GCC from the dumpster

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Well it seems that the old GNAT stuff from NYU.EDU is no more.

D:\gnat>ftp cs.nyu.edu
Connected to cs.nyu.edu.
220---------- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ----------
220-Local time is now 23:26. Server port: 21.
220-Only anonymous FTP is allowed here
220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server.
220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity.
User (cs.nyu.edu:(none)): anonymous
230-Your bandwidth usage is restricted
230 Anonymous user logged in
ftp> cd pub/gnat
250 OK. Current directory is /pub/gnat
ftp> ls
200 PORT command successful
150 Connecting to port 54057
README
c++-interface.ps.gz
papers
private
226 4 matches total
ftp: 46 bytes received in 0.00Seconds 46000.00Kbytes/sec.
ftp>

For those unfamiliar they provided binary builds of GCC for various platforms, including a bunch of RISC machines. It would be a great loss for anyone trying to bootstrap GCC on one of these platforms with missing parts.

Luckily I have saved them, and put them back online!

*Dec Alpha OSF4
*HP HPPA HPUX 10.20
*i386 Solaris 2.6
*SUN Sparc Solaris 2.5.1
*IBM PowerPC AIX 4.1

For anyone interested, this is how I used GNAT to turn Solaris 2.4 into something usable.

Shoebill now has working Ethernet support!

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Great news!  The excellent A/UX capable emulator Shoebill, now has working Ethernet support!  The sad news is that it only supports the TUN/TAP interface.  So Windows users are kind of left out in the fun.

Shoebill + Ethernet

Shoebill + Ethernet

Except, I’ve been here before with SIMH ages ago.  So I dusted off my source code, and injected it into Shoebill.  The first issue I had was that SLiRP was rejecting all the inputted frames, because of invalid frame length.  Even more weird is that ARP worked, and I could see the 10.0.2.2 and 10.0.2.3 virtual IP’s but TCP and UDP outbound wouldn’t work at all.

It took me longer than it should have but although this code worked great with GCC 2.7 and 3.0, 4.x breaks it.  And it’s the same reason why Shoebill originally didn’t work on Win32, the blasted packed structures!  So adding the ‘-mno-ms-bitfields’ flag to GCC is all it took, and now I could ping 10.0.2.2 for about 5-7 pings until SLiRP would crash.  I tried all kinds of stuff trying to see if there was an issue with SLiRP, but I should have payed closer attention to the debugger, with all those threads flying around.  It turns out Shoebill was trying to read & write a the same time, which caused SLiRP to crash as it is not re-entrant.  I tried to place mutex’s on every SLiRP call but that ended up having SLiRP not process any packets.  Very strange.  I then reduced it to where I read the frame out of SLiRP and pass it to Shoebill, and where Shoebill write’s a frame out the SLiRP.  And much to my amazement I can run ‘worms’ just fine!

So after a minute of worming and pinging I called it ‘good enough’ and rebuilt a production binary, and packaged up my source code.

For anyone who want’s to play, my Win32 EXE is here, and the source code I am using is here.

Shoebill ported to Windows!

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Shoebill!

Shoebill!

Good news, as mentioned here, the Shoebill emulator was recently given some much-needed SDL love, and ported to Linux.

Well, that’s great and all, but the vast majority of people who run anything these days do it with Windows.  So I decided to try to get it to compile with MinGW to see how far I could get.

And the short version is that I got it working!

The long version is that in the first pass there is some SIGUSR2 stuff that is undefined.  And for a good reason, since it won’t work.  So, I just commented them out.  The next minor problem was the lack of bzero.  Honestly, I don’t know why bzero is missing from MinGW, but who knows why.

Shoebill also processes some internal macros with a perl script that for some reason was dropping in binary values into the source, making GCC mad.  I just commented out a line that was adding in more comments into the header.  This let me compile with a simple pass.

There was some issues reading the ROM file, since the 68000 is a BIG ENDIAN processor, and the 8086 is LITTLE ENDIAN, Shoebill makes extensive use of hotns and hotnl, ntohl, and ntohll.  These can be found in the winsock library, and even better they dont need any winsock initialization, they work right away.  I just have to make sure I include winsock2.h, and link against the winsock library.

However when trying to boot, the checksum was 0x00000000, not the expected value!   Luckily there was an assert to catch that and crash.  This led me to notice that in Linux files are opened in binary mode by default, while on Windows, they are opened in ASCII mode.  A quick change of all the fopen calls, and I was reading the ROM, but now crashing on the disk.

As it turns out newer versions of GCC go all crazy when it comes to structs, and try to automatically align to boundaries for quick access.  Which sound nice, until you try to read in some binary data, and expect things to be in certain locations and find out that your structure is larger than expected, and data is read in the wrong place.

The solution is to force the compiler to leave it alone with

__attribute__ ((__packed__))

HOWEVER as luck would have it, Microsoft apparently packs structures a different way, and you have to either make a macro to do a bunch of work to force it to make the structure 1:1 of what you expect, or use the CFLAG option of

-mno-ms-bitfields

And now MinGW’s GCC will build something along the lines of what it’d build on Linux.

Putting it all together, I amazingly got this!

Shoebill on Windows

Shoebill on Windows

Phew!  So for those interested, here is the source code drop(Use the updated one here!), and here is the binary.  Or a copy on archive.org.

If you ever wanted to see the “OS X” of the 1980’s, now is your chance!

Public Domain Operating System

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So, I came across this project from some random google search on Watcom the other day.  Simply put it is a MS-DOS API that is supported in both a 16bit real mode operating system, and a 32bit operating system.  It is quite sparse but very interesting all the same.  Using the ancient EMX port of GCC you can build 32bit (simple) programs, and run them in the 32bit DOS like Operating System.  What makes this even more interesting is that there is a port to the IBM 370, and 390 based hardware, along with the fictional 380.

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 6.40.03 PM

PDOS-16 booting in Qemu 1.6

Screen Shot 2013-09-16 at 6.39.47 PM

PDOS-32 booting in Qemu 1.6

You can download my diskimages, (VMDK & floppy disk) that I’ve used with Qemu to build & boot PDOS both 16bit and 32bit.

The included libc & system libraries are lacking compared to real MS-DOS, but this is public domain code, and with a bit of TLC it could be made into something much more.

AmiDevCpp

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Antoni sent me a link to this project, AmiDevCpp. It is a nice little wrapped up IDE for cross compiling applications for the following platforms:

  • AmigaOS (m68k)
  • AmigaOS4 (PPC)
  • MorphOS(PPC)
  • AROS (i386, ppc and x86_64).

Naturally it doesn’t work correctly on Wine.. .Oh well, but for you Windows users out there that haven’t installed Cygwin this is an easy way to cross build stuff for the ancient Amiga platform.

Apparently he was able to rebulid the infamous aclock using this cross compiler…

Hack 1.0.3 for Xenix (i386)

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Hack

I figured that since I could build hack for some ancient 4BSD flavors that I should be able to build hack for good old fashioned Xenix.

And it all seems to work as it should!

I used the source from here, and only had to do a few small modifications to get it to compile and run on Xenix via GCC 1.37.1 .

You can download my binary, and source mods.

I’ve managed to keep this instance of Xenix up for 19 hours, I was thinking about doing some kind of public access to this system, but I don’t know if people would even be vaguely interested..

But if you want access, I can set you up.

Although all that is of interest is ‘dungeon’, fortune, hack, robots, and ircII …

 

Good news on the QEMU fronts!

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First I found this blog post about building Qemu with CLANG instead of GCC, and I didn’t  even run it through google translate, but I had a feeling that it must work because there is simply too much text there for something that doesn’t work… Although it is with the TCG interpreter…

Qemu 1.1.0-1 on OS X 10.6.8 via clang!

And sure enough it works! (well so far I’ve only booted the IBM PS/1 MS-DOS 4.00 image I had handy. But that is good news for me as I’m planning on shifting away from running Windows all the time, and it was annoying having this powerful mac pro, but not being able to run / play with Qemu.

The move the clang would make sense as I under stand it Apple is moving away from GCC at any rate.

Also on the road to a non TGC build of Qemu I did find out the compiler included on the 10.6.3 DVD works while the later IOS update one does not…

Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-apple-darwin10
Configured with: /private/var/tmp/llvmgcc42/llvmgcc42-2336.1~3/src/configure –disable-checking –enable-werror –prefix=/Developer/usr/llvm-gcc-4.2 –mandir=/share/man –enable-languages=c,objc,c++,obj-c++ –program-prefix=llvm- –program-transform-name=/^[cg][^.-]*$/s/$/-4.2/ –with-slibdir=/usr/lib –build=i686-apple-darwin10 –enable-llvm=/private/var/tmp/llvmgcc42/llvmgcc42-2336.1~3/dst-llvmCore/Developer/usr/local –program-prefix=i686-apple-darwin10- –host=x86_64-apple-darwin10 –target=i686-apple-darwin10 –with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1 (Based on Apple Inc. build 5658) (LLVM build 2336.1.00)

GCC for update for IOS 5 … which doesn’t build a working Qemu exe

Using built-in specs.
Target: i686-apple-darwin10
Configured with: /var/tmp/gcc/gcc-5646~6/src/configure –disable-checking –enable-werror –prefix=/usr –mandir=/share/man –enable-languages=c,objc,c++,obj-c++ –program-transform-name=/^[cg][^.-]*$/s/$/-4.2/ –with-slibdir=/usr/lib –build=i686-apple-darwin10 –with-gxx-include-dir=/include/c++/4.2.1 –program-prefix=i686-apple-darwin10- –host=x86_64-apple-darwin10 –target=i686-apple-darwin10
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5646)

While the one that does come on the 10.6.3 DVD works fine.

Next up for all those of you on Windows or Win32 i386 platforms, rainbow has kindly provided a Win32 build of Qemu, which you can download from his site!  Ive booted MS-DOS on it from within VirtualBOX and it seems to work fine!

One thing I’ve noticed about 1.1.0 is that it cannot read low density 3 1/2″ disks!!!!

DJGPP 1.03 saved thanks to shovelware + cd.textfiles.com

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I can’t stress enough just how awesome cd.textfiles.com is for finding ancient stuff!

I’m not sure why I started on this quest but I was looking for some old finicky DOS extender, and started hunting for Go32, the first DOS extender used by DJGPP.  And for the heck of it, I wanted to find the first version, which I pretty much had assumed was lost to the mists of time.

However the CD-ROM shareware collection called MegaROM-1 actually had a ‘full’ copy of one of the first versions of DJGPP, 1.03.

Installation is pretty straightforward, however you have to use pkunzip for all the various old ‘methods’ of storing data in zip files, I found infozip leaves things out..

Also DJGPP 1.03 uses a LOT of environment space.. which is more so a problem for people running real MS-DOS on real machines.. (there are some!)…

Hello World!

It runs in DOSBox, but there is no doubt some stack corruption as trying to run things like dos edit result in:

Packed file is corrupt

But at least we can run more than one copy, or use a native editor.

GO-32 from this era is *NOT* DPMI compliant, nor is it VCPI compliant.  And its based on GCC 1.39, which was a popular level with things like 386 BSD, although it seems early Linux used GCC 1.40 ..  The tool chain by default outputs the GNU a.out format, but relies on modifying the linker that was separately included in G++.  Later versions of GO32 included VCPI support, and near it’s end of life version 1.10 added support for DPMI which greatly simplified things like hooking IRQ’s and doing DMA.

For those who want to play, without the pkzip fun, I’ve slapped it into a single 7zip file.  It’s not even a megabyte.  But it was 1991, when 4MB of ram seemed like an incredible amount of memory!

25 years of GCC!

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In 1987 the first announcement went out that Stallman had introduced perhaps the most important piece of GNU software ever:  GCC.

I haven’t been able to locate the 1.0 release or even the 0.9 beta (*Edit as an update, yes I’ve found it, and installed it!), as close as I could find was 1.21 from May 1st, 1988. Even at this time, GCC supported the following CPUs:

  • m68k
  • ns23k
  • spur
  • vax
Amazingly GCC at this point is pretty snappy, and very ANSI compliant unlike PCC.  At this point it still relies on native assemblers, linkers, librarians it still was pretty versatile. Back then there was no auto configuration tools you have to link configuration scripts by hand but even on VAX BSD it builds somewhat straightforward (providing you read the documentation)..

GCC 1.21 on 4.2 BSD

I don’t know if it serves any practical value but I went ahead and built a source package for GCC 1.21, along with a 4.2 BSD binary package.. I suspect it’d only be an interest to a select few.. Although if anyone has 1.0 or 0.9 I’d be interested!

By 1991 GCC 1.40 supported not only the i386, but Linux kernel.. And as they say the rest is history.

And finally a video summation of all the changes to GCC…