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Distcc With MSVC

2,046 bytes added, 12:50, 29 May 2007
Added link for compiler porters
= Project Description =
The goal of this project is to speed up Windows Mozilla Builds by spreading object compilations over several machines. This can be done by using an open source product called distcc created by Martin Pool. Unfortunately this is only available on *nix machines using gcc. Our project involves porting this software to Windows and use [http://msdn.microsoft.com/visualc/ Microsoft's Visual C++ compiler] using cygwinand msys.
= Project Leader(s) =
= Product Documentation =
The project has been focused on getting distcc to work with Mozilla, mainly because Mozilla uses GNU Makefiles which can run concurrent jobs. We have started a [[distcc_mozilla_tutorial| tutorial]] in order to help testers/developers. We have also written documentation for others who might wish to [[Adding Compilers to Distcc|add support to distcc for other compilers]] (e.g., Java, C#, etc.).
== Current Status ==
We are able to distribute and compile files using MSVC and distcc! There might * Some of the Test Cases may be some issues which ought be reported to [mailto:themysticincorrect.ca@gmailNeither Tom nor Cesar have extensive experience in CL options.com themystic.ca@gmail.com]So it may not distribute when it should, or it may distribute when it shouldn't.
== What's still to do ==
 
<!-- Taken from ben's project page -->
<table style="width: 100%;" class="standard-table" cellborder=1 border=1 cellpadding=2 cellspacing=0>
 
<tr>
<th>Task</th>
<th style="width: 10%>Priority</th>
<th style="width: 30%">Status</th>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>Fix documentation, including website, manpage, and tutorials</td>
<td style="background-color: #ff671e; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">Medium</td>
<td>Neglected. I think Tom has worked on the man page, Cesar has worked on the tutorial</td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>
* find a suitable replacement for fork()
** using windows threads. Need to use #ifdef directives to switch between unix fork and threads. But perhaps where is a better way to do this.
** Perhaps talk to Martian Pool to see if he has any ideas? He hasn't been in the mailing list for a while.
</td>
<td style="background-color: red; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">High</td>
<td>Have not started</td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>
* Send .pdb files to allow debug builds. Currently blocking mozilla from ever using distcc.
** looking at the protocol. Hopefully we don't have to changed a lot.
</td>
<td style="background-color: red; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">High</td>
<td>Have not started</td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>
* Port distcc to use mingw
** Properly link in winsock library ([http://www.foobartastic.com/2007/02/27/distcc-alpha-2-and-moving-to-mingw/ fixed] using libtool)
** use windows threads (another high priority item)
** locate and replace unix functionality that existed in cygwin, but doesn't exist in mingw.
</td>
<td style="background-color: red; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">High</td>
<td>Have only got libtool to compile a simple sockets program. We have now port it to distcc
* probably use #ifdef MINGW ... #else ... #endif in source files that use socket.h
* another possibility is to have one header file handle this, and the source files include that header file </td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>Find more applications that use the Makefile system and can use CL</td>
<td style="background-color: #ff671e; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">Medium</td>
<td>Difficult to find. Not many open source applications use Makefile and MSVC, many choosing to opt for NMake</td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>Compile NSPR using distcc</td>
<td style="background-color: #ff671e; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">Medium</td>
<td>Dave suggested only building NSPR because its smaller and won't take as long to compile. Cesar is responsible for this</td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>boy there sure are lot of memory leaks... would be nice to fix that</td>
<td style="background-color: yellow; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">Low</td>
<td>We can use tools like valgrind and mtrace to help. Or we can use Boehm-GC to free the memory automatically. But this is a lot of work for such low priority.</td>
</tr>
 
<tr>
<td>Make sure that there are no orphan distcc processes left after make maintainer-check</td>
<td style="background-color: yellow; text-align: center; font-weight: bold; font-size: bigger">Low</td>
<td>This is a problem when tests are killed, and can leave to false-negatives when you try to rerun the tests again. But that can be fixed with god ol' kill-y mc. kill, agent 009</td>
</tr>
 
</table>
 
<!--
 
{|class="standard-table" border='1'
|-
| medium
|-
| <strike>Get distcc working with Moz </strike>
{| class="standard-table" border='1'
|-
| <strike>check why MSVC Preprocessor seems to be dying with firefox 2.0 release source. Possible Solution: We're doing unix to windows path conversion on the daemon, move that code to the client and everything might be good.</strike> | <strike>high (currently Cesar & Tom)</strike>
|-
| <strike>Figure out why distributed builds die but nondistributed builds don't. This issue lies in the Moz Build System not in distcc code.</strike>
| <strike>High</strike>
|}
| <strike>HIGH</strike>|-| Get a list of programs that work with our distcc{| class="standard-table" border='1' | Application | Reporter |- | [http://cdot.senecac.on.ca/software/nled/ NLED] | Cesar |- | [http://www.mozilla.org mozilla] | Tom + Cesar |}|Medium
|-
|boy there sure are lot of memory leaks... would be nice to fix that
| low
|-
|Make sure that there are no orphan distcc processes left after make maintainer-check
| low
|-
|}
-->
== How to get distcc to compile use cl ==
Tom and Cesar created this patch keeping backwards compatibility in mind. You should be able to still use distcc to compile your c programs if you wish. But if you applied the patch, you probably want to do more than that.
If it is different for your machine, you need to find these in the Makefile.in or Makefile and change them to your settings.
== Extending the program ==This will be postponed until we get distcc working properly (not fully) with cl.
= Project Details =
= Project News =
See what's up with this project! Older news can be found [[Distcc With MSVC:Older News|here]]
 
== May 1, 2007 ==
 
I've been doing a lot of #ifdef conditions, just to get it to compile (although we will be doing windows threads instead of fork, this is just a step). But now I'm stuck on the function fcntl(). It's a POSIX function, and it has POSIX flags, but some of the flags don't seem to exist in Windows. I don't have enough information to know how important the function is, and if we can just skip it.
 
And I forgot my power cable in a certain building, and laptop is running out of battery!
 
== April 30, 2007 ==
 
There are some header files in distcc that have the same name as some of the standard header files in /usr/include. One file is rpc.h, which is being #included by "sockets.h". Since we don't need sockets.h, this shouldn't be a problem in ''this case''. But that is still something we have to watch out for.
 
Bah! windows.h #includes rpc.h, dammit.
 
Resource : [http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopMigration/taskstools/migrate/unix/ucamg/ch05uav3.mspx#EDHAC Microsofts Unix migration guide]
 
== April 28, 2007 ==
 
PDB files :
vc80.pdb - source file debug symbols
'''project'''.pdb - project debug symbols
==Jan 10, 2007== vc80.pdb can be overwritten by/Fd'''debug'''
Building moz has uncovered some still not understood issuesLink between '''source'''. See c[http://wwwpp] and '''debug''' is hard coded in the object file.foobartastic.com/2007/01/10/distributing-mozilla-builds-with-distcc-cl-not-there-yet/ http://www.foobartastic.com/2007/01/10/distributing-mozilla-builds-with-distcc-cl-not-there-yet/] for detailsYou can find it by running the ''strings'' command on the object file (Thanks shaver!).
==Jan 8, 2007==Leaving debug symbols aside. We are now passing the CL Compile Hello Caseshould probably start porting distcc to mingw and replacing incompatible functions. Since that would be more time consuming and more difficult to get right. We are also passing the CL Big Ass File case! A live test worked too! WE ROCK!
==Jan 5April 23, 2007==
As of r89 the issue of cl getting confused by unix style paths Semester is goneover. Windows builds now Because I honestly have no life, and there is work to do here, I started mapping out the distcc protocol, so we can start making any changes, if necessary. It was a function compiled wasted afternoon because the protocol is already documented in which converts unix style paths the trunk, under docs directory (/path/from/root/to/file.c) to windows style paths (c:\path/to/filewho would have guessed?).
We have chosen Preliminary examination indicates that this won't be so much work. The functions seem to already be there. == March 19, 2007 == There was a subtle bug in Mozilla's code base that [https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=374563 bug 274563] deals with that made it impossible for distcc to build Moz. If you apply the patch attached to not use the [httphttps://wwwbugzilla.kodersmozilla.com/cpporg/fidCE5308B03815EF7102099FCA59337FBC73C2FA00show_bug.aspxcgi?sid=cygpath cygpath code374563 bug] since wethen you're unlikely ll be able to need do distcc builds of Mozilla. We will soon be releasing our first beta to check reflect our confidence in the mount table and code. ==Feb 27, 2007== We are able to do all that fancy distributed builds of Mozilla but it dies when trying to link stufftogether (issues surrounding ATL?). This function is "smart" enough So in order to realize that "take advantage of Ben Smedberg's wonderful [http://home" is under the cygwin install dirbenjamin.smedbergs. However the build system is not clever enough us/blog/2007-01-12/mozillabuild-rc1/ Mozilla Build] and be able to get help figuring out weird linkage bugs and dependancies without having to check where deal with cygwin is installedissues (which are galore), we've started a branch with a mingw port: svn://cdot.senecac. This should definitly be more dynamicon.ca/distcc/branches/mingwcompatible/
==Jan 4, 2007==
hello.i : fatal error LNK1107: invalid or corrupt file: cannot read at 0xEE7F
</pre></code>
==Dec 17, 2006==
Tom has made a [http://groups.google.ca/group/mozilla.dev.builds/browse_thread/thread/60e141c996fa5eaa/02a86b97a4b9b2a7?hl=en#02a86b97a4b9b2a7 post] to the build newsgroup. The bug (Dec 6) still hasn't been fixed.
 
Also, I (Cesar) needs to do trial of building mozilla using the original distcc (gcc only). We need to present an exact log of where the problem lies. IIRC, it has something to do with gtk. But that isn't usefull enough. This information is on a ubuntu machine in the linux club at seneca college, but I think it's down because I cannot connect to it. '''I am not going to school on my break to turn on a friggin machine'''.
 
==Dec 6, 2006==
The major bug right now is that compiled object files don't come back :(. This will be fixed soon. Really. We promise.
 
==Nov 29, 2006==
We have finally finished a big part of our project - the functionality! Now we are in the process of testing. Inital tests were somewhat positive. We still need to debug certain problems in the patch. It will probably be finished after the semester is over. If anyone is still interested in the project and wants to help out, we still are interested in getting the results reproduced by average users.
 
==Nov 22. 2006==
We are down to our last 3 functions. We hope to have test cases done so we can really start testing out the whole application and try it with the two machines we do have.
 
==Nov 6. 2006==
There is a scheduled 'hack day' being set up. Were putting it at every tuesday at around 5:20 in the TEL open lab.
 
==Nov 2. 2006==
After a haitus from touching distcc, we battled the serpent of the C (haha) once again and retreated with our lives, barely, but lost our ego and motivation (at least Cesar did). We cleared up a path setting bug that caused CL to die and return a bad return value. Then we (eventually) passed ParseHost case, which parses an environment variable for ip addresses and domain names. A inproperly done svn merge wasted a good few hours on that.
 
We also created safeguards, so that any unimplemented vtable function that is called will throw an error message instead of having a segmentation fault.
 
==Oct 20. 2006==
We have a usable windows box for doing our msvc testing (finally!). Thanks to [[User:Bhearsum]] for the boxes.
 
==Oct 12. 2006==
Argh. I have been trying to build firefox using distcc for about 2 weeks, with many small details getting in the way. At one point things were working, but than it stopped and I don't know why. I finally, at one point, got things to build on andrew's machine. But the build failed complaining about (this is one of the many, many things) ''undefined reference operator delete(void*)''. I think it might be because distcc is calling gcc rather than c++. I changed the MOZCONFIG to use CC='distcc gcc' and CXX='distcc g++'. This threw me this ugliness :
make[1]: warning: jobserver unavailable: using -j1. Add `+' to parent make rule.
Which I told reed about, but has never came across this problem. One nasty solution is to use -j without specifing a number to allow unlimited jobs. At least it's working.
 
In other news, Tom sent a [http://lists.samba.org/archive/distcc/2006q4/003466.html patch].
 
== Oct. 2 2006 ==
A preliminary test of running distcc in cygwin revealed we were failing 4 tests; one or two more than our first patch. We tried to fix it, but never had success and didn't issue a commit. A while later we try running distcc again on another machine. This time we were only failing one test, which is less than our first patch. Here is the known tests to fail
# EmptySource_Case --- This is expected to fail since this is a bug in the earlier gcc compiler.
The explination for the extra three preliminary tests failing is because we interupted one of the tests, which we believed caused the daemon to be orphaned and exacting it's revenge on the murder's of it's parent processes.
 
== Sept. 26 2006 ==
Tried to do parallel builds with mozilla in linux (maybe we should have done this first). Here is something usefull to know :
To parallel build in mozilla, you cannot pass the -jN option to make and expect it to work. It didn't for me, and make was killing itself without an explination. I later learned that you have to add the following line to mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_MAKE_FLAGS=-j8
 
== Sept. 24 2006 ==
 
We think we've got the architecture right now. Ofcourse the only way to know is to start porting cl :). We're now going to try to port the tests to work with cl.exe.

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