Re: Forth for Mac OS X Leopard (Intel) - what are the options?

sToRNG.BaRE.dURiD@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 <sToRNG.BaRE.dURiD@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Regarding building ciforth/Lina for OS X  ...
>
> Been looking and I _think_ I may now know how to call the OS X kernel
> (intel). One may be able to call the OS X kernel with these (hopefully
> correct) assumptions :

You're best off looking up the syscall numbers, as some of them do
differ.  Otherwise that looks fairly correct.

You want to read http://www.int80h.org/bsdasm/
if you haven't already.

> Now porting Lina:
>
> All potentially a pleasant evening's work EXCEPT
>
> *** LINKING ***
>
> As you say, one needs to know how to link.
>
> This is very painful given my lack of knowledge of certain
> fundamentals of OS X and linux binaries - how they link etc..
>
> I do not fully understand yet:
> 1. The ELF binary format
> 2. And of course, mach-o
> 3. Lastly I guess I've just had your source for 8 hours :) I'm
> printing a copy...
>
> Have you any suggestions?

Have you had problems?  The assembler should produce an object file, the
linker should produce an executable.  The commands should be basically
the same as on Linux.

Or are you talking about SAVE-SYSTEM?  I admit that's not trivial.

I haven't looked closely at Mach-O, but it appears to be conceptually
similar to other executable/linking formats.  And I do know ELF, so I
could probably walk you through it; feel free to e-mail me if you have
questions or want help.  Here are links to the documentation:

Mach-O:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/DeveloperTools/Conceptual/MachORuntime/MachORuntime.pdf

ELF
http://refspecs.freestandards.org/elf/gabi41.pdf
http://refspecs.freestandards.org/elf/abi386-4.pdf

> If any one EVER gets a complete reference of all the direct OS X XNU
> kernel calls, please please please please please send it my way :)

If you get (or already have) the XNU source, you should be able to
locate a syscalls.master file which will at least give you all the
syscall numbers.  This is speculation, as I haven't ever had an OS X
machine (I have a dual-G4 from just before OS X came out).  But I did
look through some of the OS X source at one point, and I believe the
syscall layer is essentially straight from the BSD source, so it should
be there.

Good luck,

--Josh