*BSD support in 6.8.3

[Simon Marlow]

Donn Cave wrote:
> On Fri, 30 May 2008 10:43:22 -0400
> Gregory Wright <gwright at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
>>> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/attachment/ticket/2013/2013.patch
>>>
>>> *BSD folks please test.
>>>
>> I built the 20080529 snapshot with this patch and my light testing of  
>> ghci
>> showed no problems (FreeBSD 7.0/x86_64).
> 
> 20080531 and NetBSD-amd64 4.0, not so good:
> 
>    GHCi, version 6.8.2.20080531: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
>    Loading package base ... linking ... done.
>    Bad system call (core dumped)
> 
> SIGSYS appears to happen in select(), is all I could get out of gdb.  Prior
> to the patch, it was the usual error.

I guess the error in the linker was masking the SIGSYS in select(), because 
it occurred first.  So now we need to figure out what is causing this SIGSYS.

> Otherwise, 20080531 seems to work as well as 6.8.2 release on NetBSD-amd64.
> NetBSD defines ELF64_ST_TYPE and ELF64_ST_BIND.
> 
> Unfortunately, it won't build with the GNU "ar" that's standard on this
> platform.  It can't index archives as big as libHSbase.a:  apparently, it
> allocates too many moderately large hash tables for the many small modules
> in that archive, and runs out of memory.  I worked around this by reducing
> the default hash table size in libbfd.so.  I'm not saying any of this makes
> sense, it's just what I eventually managed to get working.  Otherwise, it
> builds smoothly.

Perhaps turning off -split-objs would also work around this problem?

Cheers,
	Simon