I.3 Notes for Amiga platforms

The Amiga has now been re-released as a completely new machine which comes with a completely new operating system. As a result, I will not be implementing any of the following features (or fixing any of the following problems) in mpatrol for the old AmigaOS. Support for the new AmigaOS may be added in the future.

• Perhaps add support for building mpatrol as an Amiga shared library. I attempted to do this in a previous release of mpatrol, but it would have involved too many source changes to get working fully. Perhaps it's not even worth implementing as the archive library works fine. However, if it is built as a shared library and malloc() and related functions are dynamically linked in some executable files then perhaps it would be possible to override these functions, thus getting the `--dynamic' option in the mpatrol command to work.

• Need to fix the problem where the maximum guaranteed alignment of an internal mpatrol library memory allocation is 8 bytes. However, this limitation does not affect the memalign() and related functions, and should not have any effect on the running of mpatrol since no datatypes require an alignment of more than 8 bytes.

• Need to add proper support for call stack traversal for both the Motorola 680x0 and PowerPC processor architectures. When gcc is being used then up to two stack frames can be traversed, but this should really be extended without requiring MP_BUILTINSTACK_SUPPORT. When SAS/C is being used then there is no support for call stack traversal.

• Need to add proper support for reading symbols from Amiga executable files. When gcc is being used then the BFD library routines will be called to determine the symbols from the executable file, but this will only work for objects compiled with gcc and there currently appears to be a problem getting the `USEDEBUG' option to work. When SAS/C is being used then there is no support for reading symbols from executable files. Also need to add support for reading symbols from any shared libraries that are required by the program.

• Possibly make use of other software such as Enforcer, Mungwall or MuLib in order to provide some form of memory protection. The features of SegTracker could also be put to good use so that the file and hunk location of entries on the call stack could be determined.

• Could add support for the `EDIT' and `LIST' options. This would probably involve finding a way to invoke a shell script without having to search for the script file or allocating memory in the process.

• Add GUI support for the mptrace command.

• When using SAS/C it is currently not possible to override the definition of malloc(), etc., without including the `mpatrol.h' header file first. This is because the compiler startup code and libraries call malloc() before everything is set up, and so the library cannot properly initialise itself if the malloc() that the startup code finds is the malloc() in the mpatrol library. This restriction does not exist when using gcc.

• Add support for the Amiga in the threads test in `tests/pass/test5.c'. The Amiga doesn't really have support for threads but its processes are similar enough to threads.

• Perhaps add an Installer installation script with icons.