3.1 An overview of the porting process

A particular port of GNU lightning is composed of four files. These have a common suffix which identifies the port (for example, i386 or ppc), and a prefix that identifies their function; they are:

• `asm-suffix.h', which contains the description of the target machine's instruction format. The creation of this file is discussed in Creating the run-time assembler.

• `core-suffix.h', which contains the mappings from GNU lightning's instruction set to the target machine's assembly language format. The creation of this file is discussed in Creating the platform-independent layer.

• `funcs-suffix.h', for now, only contains the definition of jit_flush_code. The creation of this file is briefly discussed in More complex tasks in the platform-independent layer.

• `fp-suffix.h', which contains the description of the target machine's instruction format and the internal macros for doing floating point computation. The creation of this file is discussed in Implementing macros for floating point.

Before doing anything, you have to add the ability to recognize the new port during the configuration process. This is explained in Automatically recognizing the new platform.