What is needed to fix valgrind for PPC?

[barracuda156]

@LouisBrunner Could you recommend how to restore PPC support?

I tried to build valgrind for PPC now, and it fails:

checking build system type... powerpc-apple-darwin10
checking host system type... powerpc-apple-darwin10
checking for a supported CPU... ok (powerpc)
checking for a 64-bit only build... no
checking for a 32-bit only build... yes
checking for a supported OS... ok (darwin10)
checking for the kernel version... Darwin 10.x (10.8.0) / Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
checking for a supported CPU/OS combination... no (ppc32-darwin)
configure: error: Valgrind is platform specific. Sorry. Please consider doing a port.
Command failed:  cd "/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_macports_release_tarballs_ports_devel_valgrind/valgrind/work/valgrind-3.16.1" && ./configure --prefix=/opt/local --without-mpicc --enable-only32bit --build=powerpc-apple-darwin10

(This is under Rosetta, since I am away from my PPC machines now.)

valgrind is supposed to work from 10.5 up, and 10.5 supports ppc32 and ppc64 (on 10.6 only ppc32 is supported).

[LouisBrunner]

Hi @barracuda156,

While PowerPC is supported for Linux, it doesn't seem like it was ever supported for macOS (couldn't find any reference to it in the code but the upstream maintainers will know better than me).

I am currently focusing on restoring macOS 11 and later support (including leaks tracking) and arm64 support so I won't be able to help much on this for a while.

However if you are looking for recommendations how to do this yourself, you can use this branch as an example: main...feature/ios
It adds basic arm64 support and highlight all the different parts of valgrind which need to change (including multiple extra assembly files).