gcl/maxima on hppa

[Camm Maguire <camm@enhanced.com>]

Greetings!  The hppa port is quite close, but there is still a garbage
collection issue.  Briefly, gcl's garbage collector is apparently not
finding all valid data pointers when traversing the C stack.  gcl's gc
has been successfully tested on all Debian architectures except hppa,
with an arch-specific patch being recently required for ia64, in which
a walking of the *second* C stack was added.

Looking over the boehm-gc code, the only unusual item appears to be a
requirement to align malloc results on 8 byte boundaries even when
running in 32bit mode.  

1) Why is this?  Even when implemented in gcl, some gc problems still
   remain. 
2) Is there anything unusual about the C stack on hppa?
3) When looking at the situation in a debugger, certain local
   variables on the stack cannot report their address, apparently
   indicating they are stored in registers.  Is there a way to flush
   these reliably to memory before collecting garbage?

Take care,
-- 
Camm Maguire			     			camm@enhanced.com
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"The earth is but one country, and mankind its citizens."  --  Baha'u'llah