The current release of CMUCL should work on the following combinations of operating system and architecture:

Linux/x86

The 19e release binaries should work on any i586 or better processor. The binaries are compiled against version 2.2 of the GNU C Library (glibc2.2), but also work with glibc2.3. The runtime support for the CMUCL Motif interface is dynamically linked, so you will need the Motif or Lesstif libraries (preferably version 2) installed on your system to use it. The binaries should run with any Linux kernel after 2.0 (but beware early kernels in the 2.4 series, which had poor virtual memory characteristics).

There are problems running CMUCL on certain kernels that are built with address-space randomization techniques, such as certain Fedora kernels. If you run into problems, please use a vanilla kernel.

There are known problems running CMUCL on 2.4 kernels using certain configurations of the HIGHMEM support (this option allows larger process address spaces, and certain distributions ship kernels with these patches enabled). The CONFIG_64GB and CONFIG_1GB options work fine.

CMUCL is known not to run under libsafe, whose system call interposition mechanism interferes with the foreign function interface. CMUCL does not run on kernels with "hardening" patches such as grsecurity, since their all-the-world-is-C assumptions are too strong.

Darwin/x86

The 19e release binaries should work on any processor supported by MacOS X (x86).

FreeBSD/x86

The 19e release binaries should work on any i586 or better processor. The 19e binaries should work with FreeBSD releases 4.x and -current (5.x).

Solaris/SPARC

the 19e binaries should work with SunOS 5.5 or later (also known respectively as Solaris 2.5, Solaris 7 and later). They require an UltraSPARC processor. If you have an ancient SPARC machine, you can get the non-v9 version of the 18e release. If you have an UltraSPARC the command uname -m will say sun4u, if you have an older machine such as a SparcStation it will probably say sun4m.

The following platforms are not supported by the current CMUCL release, but were supported by previous releases:

NetBSD/x86

The 19c release binaries should work on any i586 or better processor. The 19c binaries should work with NetBSD releases xx and yy.

OpenBSD/x86

There are currently no 19c binaries for OpenBSD (it seems that address space randomization techniques introduced with recent versions of OpenBSD interfere with CMUCL's memory management). The 18e release binaries should work on any i486 or better processor. The 18e binaries were build on OpenBSD 3.1.

PowerPC/MacOS X

The 19c release binaries work with MacOS X version 10.4 (Tiger), 10.3 (Panther) and 10.2 (Jaguar).

Alpha/Linux

There are no 19c binaries for Alpha. The 18e binaries are known to work on ev56 and ev6 machines, running Linux 2.4.x.

IRIX/MIPS

There are no 19c binaries for IRIX. The 18e release binaries are known to work with Irix 6.2, and should work on any later version. They use the o32 ABI.

HPUX/HPPA

this port has not been maintained for quite a while, so you'll have to go back to the 18a release to find binaries for this platform.

The SBCL implementation (a fork from CMUCL) runs on some platforms that CMUCL doesn't currently support, such as Linux/SPARC, Linux/PowerPC, Linux/Alpha -- check their web site for current status.

Platform-specific build options

The builds for x86 platforms include a generational conservative garbage collector (this can be tested for through the presence of the :gencgc feature). The other architectures use a stop-and-copy garbage collector.

The x86 builds also include basic multiprocessing support (this can be tested for through the presence of the :mp feature). The implementation is based on stack groups, ie user-level threads, and not on kernel threads. The interface is very similar to the CLIM-SYS specification.