Hello !
I want to give a brief overview of what the status of powerpc-solaris
support for GCC I am spending last month on.
Before I am going any further I want to emphasize that I am not a
compiler specialist, so it possible that I am overlooking or ignoring
something important. If you spot things like that - speak up.
I very much welcome it.
Back to the toolchain. During the genunix building quest a month ago
it became quite evident that current cross tool chain is not adequate
for the job. It wasn't really a surprise for me, since I made it as
a quick'n'dirty solution just to see that it can be used with Solaris
code base in general. As long as we are simply compiling kernel modules
it hardly matters too much, but as soon as we're going to actually _run_
it on the real hardware the tool chain becomes a serious road blocker.
With that in mind I walked through the GCC releases back to the point
where it dropped powerpc-solaris2.5.1 support (it turned out that the
last release to support it was 3.0.4) and tried to determine how
different Solaris support became since then. Well, it changed quite a
bit - current GCC (as shipped with Nevada in SUNWgccS package) is a
heavily modified version of gcc-3.4.3 release which adds many Sun's cc
specific features to GCC. It is my understanding that it was done in
order to minimize the amount of code changes needed to have Solaris
code base buildable with gcc.
So I tried to combine powerpc/solaris bits from 3.0.4 with the current
SUNWgccS tree. [The release tagged as 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-20050802),
but I am using SUNWgccS as it is much shorter :)]
I am getting to the point where I can produce the compiler itself and
starting to test it. The obvious regression test is to have the new
compiler being able to compile same objects the old/[current] one can.
BTW, this time I am using pkgbuild/pkgtool utility from JDS
consolidation and it is way more easier to automate and reproduce the
whole process now. [Side note - pkgbuild would make an excellent
build system for Blastwave].
I am planning to have the new tool chain available on our new Trac
site (I am _so_ glad we have it) near the end of this week and having
it ready to replace our current kit by the end of the month. BTW,
we have an appropriate milestone defined and tickets will be accepted
there for issues discovered.
I think that we will have to have a flag day in order to switch over
to the new kit, but we'll see when we'll get there.
That's more or less the status.
Comments, questions, flames, ideas are very welcome - discussion
of any sort is better than silence.
Regards,
Cyril
