Platform Notes


Building the CCL kernel from source on OSX/Darwin requires that the Xcode command-line tools be fully installed; what you may need to do to ensure that they are tends to vary between Xcode releases.

As of version 5.x, installing Xcode via the Mac App Store may install the Xcode GUI and at least some of the command-line tools, but doesn't install header files or other components needed to compile code. In order to ensure that the Xcode command-line tools are actually functional (what a concept ...), it may be necessary to run the "xcode-select" program at a Terminal prompt:

$ xcode-select --install

If the Xcode components are already installed, that command can fail with a cryptic and frightening error message. Apple is a multi-billion dollar company; they'd presumably have a few $K less if they paid someone to actually think about any of this ...


There are two incompatible ABIs in common use on Linux/ARM systems. One of them passes floating-point arguments in floating-point registers (the hard-float ABI) and the other does not (the soft-float ABI). The lisp-kernel binary that is included in the Subversion repository uses the soft-float ABI. If this binary doesn't work on your system, then simply re-compile the lisp kernel:

$ cd lisp-kernel/linuxarm
$ make clean && make

This will build the lisp kernel using the default floating-point ABI for your system, which is probably what you want. It's also possible to specify which ABI you want to use by editing the file in the lisp-kernel/linuxarm directory and then re-running the commands above.


Certain Linux kernel versions can fail to correctly restore the FPU state after running a signal handler. This can cause CCL to crash or perhaps produce incorrect results.

The following links include some of the gory details;

Please be sure to run a kernel with these fixes. Kernel versions 2.6.37 or and later should include them.


On the PPC, there are addressing modes that make it easy to deal with 16-bit constants and 16-bit absolute addresses. CCL exploits this: things like NIL and T are 16-bit constants (and the addresses of things that are mapped into low memory); conditional calls to runtime support routines can use "branch absolute" instructions to call those routines (which are also mapped into the low 16 bits of the address space). Apple uses a similar scheme to reference critical library routines in Mac OS X (since the addressing mode generally involved signed 16-bit addresses, Apple's scheme uses addresses in the high 16 bits of the address space). That sort of thing is what the addressing modes are for, after all.

The Linux kernel provides a feature that can prevent a process from mapping addresses below a certain base address. The idea, apparently, is that this will prevent exploitation of undiscovered null pointer dereference bugs in the kernel.

The parameter in question is called mmap_min_addr; one can cat the file /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr to see what the current setting is.

Some recent Linux distributions (including Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8) ship with this value set to 65536. This has the effect of preventing processes from accessing the low 64K of their address spaces. Whether this makes sense or not on other architectures is debatable; on the PPC, it means that applications that want to exploit 16-bit PPC addressing are prohibited from doing so. We don't know if anyone involved in this decision thought about this issue or what they concluded if so. It's a little hard to believe that much thought went into that decision.

Fortunately, there are a few workarounds.

Processes running as root are not subject to the restriction. However, it's not reasonable to require rootly powers just to run CCL.

The value of mmap_min_addr can be changed by writing a new value to the file /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr like so:

# echo 4096 >/proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr

This will persist only until the system is rebooted.

It should be possible to make a permanent fix by adding the line


to the file /etc/sysctl.conf. (This change will take effect on the next and subsequent reboots.)

The 4K value mentioned above will protect against certain (yet-to-be-discovered) NULL pointer deference bugs in the kernel, but will still allow applications to use low-memory addresses.

On some newer systems (Ubuntu 8.10, for instance, at least in the PS3 distribution), the 4K value doesn't work, although

# echo 0 >/proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr

will permit the lisp to run. (Setting this value to 0 doesn't necessarily make your system insecure. It might, however, make it possible or easier to exploit yet-to-be-discovered bugs in the Linux kernel.)

On the x86 platform, there's no architectural advantage to using 16-bit addresses (when it's even possible to do so). Version 1.1 of CCL/OpenMCL happened to use very similar/very low addresses (there was no reason not to); 1.2 and later use addresses above 64K (mostly because Windows restricts access to the low 64K for other reasons.)

It might be possible to rearchitect PPC CCL not to exploit this architectural feature, but the thought of doing so is not particularly attractive.

FreeBSD (i386,amd64)

The distributed versions of Clozure CL are built on a FreeBSD 6.4 system; they should run unmodified on any 6.x system. (In general, the 64-bit version requires a 64-bit ("amd64") FreeBSD release; the 32-bit version of CCL should run on a 32-bit FreeBSD release or on a 64-bit release if the "lib32" 32-bit libraries are installed.)

FreeBSD changes library versions on major releases and executable files refer to the libraries that they depend on via versioned names, so the distributed CCL kernel (built on a 6.x system) won't run on a 7.x FreeBSD system (because the 6.x versions of the libraries it depends on aren't installed.) There are two ways to work around this:

  1. Install the "compat6x" package, which provides the 6.x libraries on a 7.x system. This can be done via the FreeBSD ports system:
    $ cd /usr/ports/misc/compat6x
    $ sudo make install
  1. Build the kernel yourself on the 7.x system
    $ cd ccl/lisp-kernel/freebsdx8632  # or freebsdx8664
    $ make

FreeBSD doesn't provide the same level of support for multi-arch development (e.g., compiling 32-bit C code on 64-bit systems and vice versa) that Darwin, most Linux distributions, and Solaris offer; it's not generally possible to compile a 32-bit FreeBSD kernel on a 64-bit FreeBSD system. And vice versa.

It should be possible to run a 32-bit FreeBSD CCL on a 64-bit FreeBSD system and it generally is. Unfortunately, CCL triggers a bug that was introduced in the 7.1 release version of the 64-bit FreeBSD kernel (7.0 and 6.x are not affected.) See if you're interested in the gory details; the source patch in the responses to the bug report seems to work, so recompiling the 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1 kernel should enable 32-bit CCL to run on 64-bit FreeBSD 7.1. A bug that prevented 32-bit CCL from running on FreeBSD 7.1/amd64 systems has been fixed in FreeBSD 7.2

Solaris (x86)

The GNU m4 included with Open Solaris has bugs that prevent it from being usable for the build of the lisp kernel. It's probably easiest to retrieve the latest GNU m4 sources from someplace ( is one possibility), and build them locally. The lisp kernel makefiles expect a working GNU m4 to be installed as /usr/local/bin/m4, so it will be necessary to edit ccl/lisp-kernel/solarisx{86,64}/Makefile if you install the m4 binary elsewhere.

Last modified 6 years ago Last modified on Apr 7, 2014, 8:30:10 PM