System Requirements

Hardware Dependencies

32-bit x86

32-bit x86 versions of Clozure CL depend on the presence of the SSE2 instruction set extensions. Most ia32 hardware manufactured and sold in the last several years supports SSE2 (all Apple Intel-based Macs do, for instance), but there are some exceptions.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2 contains lists of CPUs that support SSE2 (as well as some of the more notable exceptions.)

PowerPC

There are no known hardware compatibility issues.

64-bit x86

There are no known hardware compatibility issues.

Operating System

Mac OS X/Darwin

All PPC and x86 versions of CCL 1.3 should work on Mac OS X 10.4.x and 10.5.x. (Older OS releases aren't supported.)

In order to build the lisp kernel with the XCode tools that come with OS X 10.6, it's necessary to enable optional 10.4 support when installing XCode. If you haven't done this, you'll see errors like "no include path in which to search for mach-o/dyld.h" very early in the build process.

FreeBSD

x86 (32- and 64-bit) versions of CCL 1.3 should work on FreeBSD 6.x and 7.x. See PlatformNotes for FreeBSD-specific issues.

Linux

Because of the nature of Linux distributions, it's difficult to give precise version numbers; in general, a "fairly modern" (no more than 2 or three years old) kernel and C library are more likely to work well than older versions. In some cases, if the distributed version of the CCL kernel doesn't work on a particular Linux release because of library version issues, it may be possible to build a working version by recompiling the kernel on that Linux release.

Memory-management policies in recent PPC Linux distributions may require workarounds; see PlatformNotes for details.

Solaris

All development and testing of CCL for Solaris has been done on OpenSolaris (Solaris 11); it's not known if CCL works on older OS releases.

Windows

32- and 64-bit versions of CCL should work on Windows XP and Vista (at least.) See WindowsNotes for Windows-specific issues.

Feedback

I (gb) think that the information is accurate; corrections, clarifications, and additions are all welcome.