On Wed, Apr 03, 2013 at 09:56:58AM -0400, Dubiousjim wrote:

Ok, with all of that, the build completes. And the build ghc-stage2 (which I temporarily named inplace/lib/ghc-stage2.exe, but now let's restore it to its original name) does in fact execute on the target machine:

$ inplace/lib/ghc-stage2 --version The Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compilation System, version 7.6.2 $ inplace/lib/ghc-stage2 --interactive ghc-stage2: missing -B<dir> option $ cat ~/hello.hs main = putStrLn "Hello World!\n" $ inplace/lib/ghc-stage2 -B./inplace/lib ~/hello.hs -o hello $ ./hello Can't modify application's text section; use the GCC option -fPIE for position-independent executables.

That's as far as I've got for now. Hopefully someone will have bothered to read this far and have some suggestions for what I should be doing differently, or how to proceed from here, to get the compiled ghc-stage2 really working on the target machine, so that I can use it to compile ghc on the target machine directly.

Oh, in fact I'm closer than I thought. The error I reported as:

$ inplace/lib/ghc-stage2 -B./inplace/lib --interactive GHCi, version 7.6.2: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loading package ghc-prim ... ghc-stage2: mmap 442368 bytes at (nil): Operation not permitted ghc-stage2: Try specifying an address with +RTS -xm<addr> -RTS

is in fact due to my forgetfulness. My target system uses PaX kernel security, and so compilers like ghc have to be tweaked before they can be used: $ paxctl -c inplace/lib/ghc-stage2 $ paxctl -m inplace/lib/ghc-stage2 $ inplace/bin/ghc-stage2 -B./inplace/lib --interactive GHCi, version 7.6.2: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done. Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done. Loading package base ... linking ... done. Prelude> Yay, the interpreter works! But there's still something funny with the binaries generated by the compiler. That means I can't yet use this ghc to directly recompile ghc on my target system. $ cat ~/hello.hs main = putStrLn "Hello World!\n" $ rm -f hello $ inplace/bin/ghc-stage2 -B./inplace/lib ~/hello.hs -o hello [1 of 1] Compiling Main ( /home/jim/hello.hs, /home/jim/hello.o ) [flags changed] Linking hello ... $ ./hello Can't modify application's text section; use the GCC option -fPIE for position-independent executables. Seems like I'm close, but not quite there yet. Supplying the flag -fPIE to ghc when building hello says: ghc-stage2: unrecognised flags: -fPIE The flag -fPIC on the other hand is accepted, but then the generated binary hello still fails with the same error. -- dubiousjim@gmail.com