On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 2:17 PM, Brendan Conoboy <blc@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On 11/23/2011 06:59 PM, Michael Hope wrote: >> >> Hi Jon. I've cc'ed Marcin and Ricardo who are working on the Linaro >> platform side. > > > Hi Michael, Marcin and Ricardo. I'm working with Jon on or ARM endeavors > and thought I'd follow-up since compilers are one of the few areas where I > have more expertise than he. Comments inline below. > >> Currently we have a Linaro + Ubuntu sauce cross compiler, plain Linaro >> cross compiler, and plain Linaro native compiler. We're working on a >> plain tarball cross compiler that runs on generic Linux or Windows as >> well. > > Fedora sauce is essentially the rpm packaging. It's actually quite > straight-forward to turn a basic build script (configure; make all install) > into an rpm, so the technical effort needed in this endeavor may be minor. Sounds good. Note that Linaro produce a drop in replacement for FSF GCC so we should be able to re-use your existing packaging. How about splitting things up, such as gcc vs g++ vs Fortran vs binutils packages? >> The Linaro + Ubuntu sauce cross compiler is in the Ubuntu archive from >> at least Natty onwards and Marcin is working on making these available >> in Debian. The plain Linaro compilers are in a PPA, don't include the >> Ubuntu specific patches, and are more up to date. >> >> You probably want your default cross compiler to be the same as the >> native compiler to reduce surprises so you'll probably want both a FSF >> and Linaro cross compiler. > > > One of the more complicated elements of Fedora Linaro integration that > Fedora maintains its own gcc. This is essentially FSF stable plus rpm > sauce. There is definitely room for a Linaro cross compiler. There might > be room for a Linaro native compiler. > > There are a few avenues we would like to explore: > > 1. Making the Linaro cross package set available for i686, x86_64, armv7hl > and possibly armv5tel rpm-based distributions such as Fedora and RHEL. > These same packages would likely work on SuSE, Mandriva, etc. The end goal > is to get a wider audience able to use the same tool set, regardless of > their Linux distribution. This wouldn't need to be limited to gcc and > binutils- any package that makes sense to run on a non-arm system might be a > valid candidate including qemu, cross-gdb, etc as you mentioned below. My > general assumption is that this would be a pure-Linaro set of packages so > that the libc linaro-gcc links with would be linaro-libc, rather than > Fedora-arm libc- that sort of thing. We don't have a libc as there hasn't been the need. The cross compiler could either target the Fedora ARM port or the Linaro LEBs. > 2. Making the Linaro native package set available on Fedora ARM. This is > tricky and will be both technically interesting and perhaps controversial. > Questions to be answered include things like: Should linaro gcc replace the > system gcc? Whose libc should be used? Marcin is working on a gcc-linaro package that you can install alongside the native compiler. The other question of 'could Fedora switch to Linaro GCC' is a big one but we do support ARMv7, ARMv5, x86_64, and i386, will investigate bugs found on other platforms, and have been used by Ubuntu for some time. Those should help calm some nerves :) >> Regarding next steps, I'm afraid we don't have much Fedora packaging >> knowledge in Linaro but are happy to help when you run into problems >> and do any bug triage. Any thoughts on where the scripts or binaries >> would be hosted, or who would keep it up to date? > > That's the big question- who would support this endeavor? We have precedent > for #1 in Fedora with the mingw cross compiler, but that is very > Fedora-centric. To bring in the wider rpm-based community, Linaro is the > logical place to host as it is the "source." With that in mind, what would > we need to do to make rpms automagicaly build any time debs are produced? > Once packages are in rpm format it's very straight-forward for anybody to > start using them, pulling updates, etc. I'd have to bring that up with management. We'll support you if you use it but producing and maintaining the packaging is an overhead. >> You might want Linaro GDB, QEMU, and the work that's going on into >> libjpeg-turbo as well. We do the changes in Ubuntu to demonstrate the >> improvements, but I wonder if there's a way of sharing the whats and >> whys so other distros can consider making the same changes. > > > Fedora generally pulls from the official upstream so anything that gets > pushed there trickles back down eventually. It's not exactly ideal for > cooperating on multi-package architecture-specific distribution such as > Linaro produces, but the changes do make their way eventually. In Fedora > ARM we've reinvented the wheel a few times, as it were, and would like to > bridge the upstream gap wherever feasible. > > Would you all be interested in a conference call to discuss? That would be good. I'm travelling next week so the week of the 12th is best. Let's see where we go over email and organise a call past that. -- Michael _______________________________________________ arm mailing list arm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/arm
