[Barrelfish-users] About porting application to Barrelfish

[Zaheer Chothia]

Dear Tom,

> These days, I am considering porting some network applications (like Bro,
> Click, etc.) to Barrelfish. But I don't know how to start, for example, how
> to write a Hakefile when original Makefile is quite complex? And what
> interfaces should I modify to make them work?

That sounds interesting and having Click running would be a very useful
contribution.  I suspect the biggest porting challenge would be dealing
with the network stack (currently based on lwIP; can be fragile).

As a starting point, gather a list of all library functions invoked and
check whether they are available on Barrelfish.  One way of doing this
is to compile natively and inspect the binary:
  $ objdump --syms myexe | grep 'UND' | sed 's/.* \(.*\)/\1/' | sort

As for dealing with external build systems, have a look at [1].  You
can build a full cross-compiler and use it directly with autoconf/CMake
rather than converting everything to Hake.

Best regards,

--Zaheer

[1] http://wiki.barrelfish.org/CrossCompiler