Platform Support¶
NovaProva is available on the following platforms.
- Linux x86
- Linux x86_64
- Darwin x86_64 (from releaae 1.5)
NovaProva supports the GNU compiler up to gcc 9, including support for the DWARF-4 debugging standard. Various versions of the clang compiler have also been used successfully on some platforms.
From release 1.5, NovaProva needs to be built with a compiler with C++11 support, for example gcc 4.8.2 or later. However you don’t need a C++11 compiler, or even a C++ compiler, to use NovaProva.
This table describes how NovaProva supports various modern toolchain features. Some modern platforms enable these toolchain features by default, so to use NovaProva you may need to disable those features using compiler options.
| Feature | Support |
|---|---|
| The DWARF-5 standard | Unsupported. Please disable using the -gdwarf-4 compiler option. |
| The DWARF-4 standard | Supported since release 1.5. |
| The DWARF-3 standard | Supported since release 1.5. |
| Intel CET (Control-flow Enforcement Technology) | Unsupported. Please disable using the -fcf-protection=none compiler option. |
| Compressed Debug Info sections | Unsupported. Please disable using the -gz=none compiler option. |
| Separate Debug Info files | Supported on MacOS (.dSYM) since release 1.5.
Not supported on Linux. |
| ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) | Supported since release 1.5. |
You may note that this is not a lot of platforms. The reason is that the design of NovaProva requires it to be deeply dependent on unobvious and undocumented aspects of the operating system it runs on, particularly the kernel, the dynamic linker, and the C runtime library. As such it is unlikely that it could be successfully ported to an OS for which source was not available. Also, NovaProva achieves its greatest value when paired with Valgrind, which itself is even more dependent on the underlying OS. For more information on porting NovaProva to other platforms, see Porting NovaProva.