January 23, 2005 11:34 AM

64bit: current status

This diary entry describes the current status of OpenOffice.org 64bit porting to AMD64 architecture, effort of several people.

During this weekend, I committed all patches Kendy and me generated against m71s1 to the child workspace ooo64bit02 and made several additional changes needed there (back merging stuff like LINK in the environment, etc.) I packed the complete tree we use now to OOo_ooo64bit02_source.tar.gz.

Additional patches are needed right now: Using these patches and gcc-3.4.1 with enum and visibility patches, we were able to show the splashscreen and almost immediately crash :-) There seems to be an issue in bridges for AMD64 (x86_64). I created *brute force* patch that simply doesn't raise the exception in bridges, and I was able to get a bit further (OOo_ooo64bit02_source-64bit-temp-bridges.diff).

I have uploaded both install tree and also the log from my build. It is really install tree only, not RPMs, because epm (although packaging successfully) haven't created them. But this is minor issue right now.

So: what is working, what is not and how to get the most of it? Before starting the soffice, you have to manually create the directory ~/.openoffice.org1.9.71.1/user/config/soffice.cfg. After that, you can run it and the window "Welcome to OpenOffice.org 1.9.71.1" will be opened. You can click "Cancel" here, and OpenOffice.org will exit successfully. The button "Help" here doesn't work, it SIGSEGVs in SfxObjectShell::GetModel. The same crash will be described below while running Help from UI.

The button "Next" works, of course, so you can go further in the Installation wizard. Now you can Decline the license or accept it. Yes, you really can Decline the license even though you can't decline it in SRC680_m73 (see #i41130# for more details ;-).

After accepting the license, you'll see "User Information" dialog. Do not try to set focus by clicking in any field there, because it will crash in _XIMCountVaList in libX11.so.6 (called from SalI18N_InputContext::SalI18N_InputContext).

When you click "Next" here, you will see the dialog "OpenOffice.org Registration". You can click on radio buttons happily (the first one does not work also in x86 build and it is already known/fixed somewhere).

After clicking "Finish", you should see GUI. Now you can do the following here:
  • move the mouse over toolbar and see tips
  • undock/dock the toolbar
  • lock/unlock the position of the toolbar
Do not try to activate menu items, it will crash.

I could get more progress by copying the user directory configuration from my x86 machine to my AMD64 machine and thus starting OpenOffice.org on AMD64 machine with the user config directory from classic Intel machine. Now, more things are working:
  • menu walking
  • About dialog (Ctrl+SDT works too)
  • you can turn on extended tips
  • you can open the "Open file..." dialog, but it will crash almost immediately in _XIMCountVaList
  • you can open Tools - Customize and Tools - Options dialogs
But many pieces still do not work (Help, DicOOo etc).

I'd be happy if you can confirm my findings. Please mail me about your testing - either with the install tree I provided or (better ;-) in your own build. Thanks. -----

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: OpenOffice.org