On 08/04/2017 11:20 AM, co...@sdf.org wrote: > Hi, GCC! > > I believe netbsd is the primary user of the vax target. its status is: > > good: netbsd uses gcc 5.4.0, and cross compiles its userland+kernel with > this. it runs and is also able to natively build useful programs like perl. > > bad: -O0 in places, text relocations. obvious signs of more bugs not yet > investigated. > > however, this is with a large diff to gcc. the author of most of the > changes is Matt Thomas, who is also the GCC vax port maintainer. the > biggest change is probably shared library support (... from 1998). > > I'm not sure why he hasn't committed his work upstream, but it would be > nice to bridge the gap, to make it easier for anyone (possibly myself, > in some future time after education) to adapt the code to non-deprecated > GCC APIs. > > legal - I don't think this is a real issue - most people involved have > already signed FSF paperwork, and there's commit history, so I can > explicitly ask all the people involved to state they are OK with it. > > technical - I am not a compiler expert, and this is a large unexplained > diff. even originally, the commit messages weren't very verbose. It also > adds 20 years of effectively "merge local diff to head". however, the > end result does work well enough to boot, run, etc. > > if I go down this road, how can I begin bridging this gap? Best advice is to break things down into a series of independent changes. Ideally with testcases.
Jeff
