[OpenBIOS] [PATCH] RFC: Increase dictionary size on SPARC64

[Tarl Neustaedter]

On 2010-4-13 11:19 PM, Segher Boessenkool wrote:
>> Unfortunately, it does matter. FCode still expects to run in 32-bit mode
>> and use 32-bit pointers, so the 64-bit address space doesn't buy us
>> anything.
>>      
> FCode uses 64-bit pointers on a 64-bit OF.  The only thing that's
> always 32-bit in FCode are the literals (and of course many badly-written
> FCode drivers do not work properly on 64-bit OF).
>    

Right. *Most* existing FCode drivers out there are written under 
FCode-version2 rules, and expect 32-bit machines.

It's possible to write 64-bit FCode using FCode-version3, but few do. 
Most make implicit assumptions about truncating arithmetic operations at 
32 bits and fitting pointers into 32-bit values (read/written with 
variants of l@/l!) even among the Fcode-Version3 drivers. Regrettable, 
but real.

I recently had an unpleasant experience porting the MD5 algorithm to 
64-bit (needed to run under Forth rather than FCode), and turned the air 
blue finding all the places where bad assumptions were made.