Re: mac68ksf - new softfloat Macintosh port.

[Nat Sloss <nathanialsloss%yahoo.com.au@localhost>]

On Wed, 15 Oct 2025 12:04:27 Jason Thorpe wrote:
> > On Oct 14, 2025, at 4:29 PM, Nathanial Sloss
> > <nathanialsloss%yahoo.com.au@localhost> wrote:
> > 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Now that the m68k softfloat userland libm test results are are zero
> > failures (1 expected failure).
> > 
> > I'd like to pre-announce a new port - mac68ksf.
> 
> Nat — this is super cool, and thank you for doing this work!
> 
> I would suggest a couple of things:
> 
> 1- Have we made sure that the ELF object / binaries are properly decorated
> with something that indicates they’re soft float-only?  If not, we should
> investigate that, and make sure the effort is coordinated with the
> toolchain folks.

I'm not sure as to how to go about that - I can confirm that as far as pkgsrc 
goes the packages are labeled with the correct arch but at the moment not 
binaries.

> 
> 2- We should make sure that hard float systems can natively exec the soft
> float binaries, and we should perhaps consider some sort of
> compat-dynamic-linker thing like is done with ARM with VFP or amd64 with
> 32-bit binaries / libraries.
> 

I've been doing some experimenting and as long as both versions of the libs 
are installed and LD_LIBRARY_PATH is set (or equiv) both binaries run.




> 3- Make it possible to build any hard float m68k platform as “m68ksf”
> “natively”.  This might make things better for package builders (I’m
> thinking forward to the day when perhaps we can reliably use virt68k as a
> “native” builder for m68k packages, and it would be nice to be able to do
> both).
> 

I was wondering would it be ok to add a variant of virt68k to build.sh 
(possibly called virt68ksf).  Should be easy enoungh for all m68k machines.

Having said that there's probably a better way to do it.


> But these are all very much nice-to-haves.  Kudos to you!  I know you’ve
> been working on this for quite some time!

Thanks Jason!  I'm happy I can breathe life into my PowerBook 520 which I 
really responsive to use and hopefully this means long term support for m68k 
softfloat.


> 
> -- thorpej


Best regards,

Nat