Re: Getting ready to land native-compilation on master

[wilde]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
> If some of you have some unusual or rare or exotic system or Emacs
> configuration, and did not yet try building the native-comp branch,
> this is your chance to have a go before the merge: please build the
> branch and report any issues or problems you bump into.

Today I build and started using Emacs from the on a small i368 system
with NetBSD 9.1:

System spec:
  CPU: Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270   @ 1.60GHz
  RAM: 2 GiB

Build:
- I build libgccjit from gcc 10.2.0 manually as libgccjit seems not to
  be available from pkgsrc (not checked very thoroughly though) at least
  I found no `pkgin' installable binaries...

- I had to manually remove `-ldl' from LIBGCCJIT in src/Makefile as this
  is not needed on *BSD (and triggers an error during build, when
  present)

  IMO, this should be fixed in configure.ac (The same problem might
  exist for --with-modules, in case it is supported on *BSD, didn't test
  though...)

- I hat to disable memory protection on the system to make the native
  compiler work:
    sysctl -w security.pax.mprotect.global=0
    sysctl -w security.pax.mprotect.enabled=0
  This is not a Emacs specific problem but a problem with libgccjit
  itself.  (The basic gcc jit "Hello World" example also fails with
  memory protection in place).

The native compiling Emacs itself seems to run fine (I'm right now
writing this message in gnus on the said system) and the performance
improvement is very noticeable on this small system.  Thanks a LOT to
Andrea for this major improvement of GNU Emacs!

cheers
sascha