Hello, On Tue, 2 Feb 2021, Borislav Petkov wrote: > + Micha. Huh, someone found my video ;-) > > > > > > attributes for example), but is far from being able to compile > > > > > > a kernel A _current_ kernel maybe :) Some 4.6 x86-64 kernel in qemu in a certain config plus a little patches definitely does work. Slowly, but usable. See the repo Boris mentioned. > > > > It's definitely something to work towards - but I don't know if kernel > > > > advancements requiring newer GCC versions will go slow enough to allow > > > > TCC improvements to arise. This isn't just something like with Clang > > > > where a few tweaks to files and to Clang itself did the trick. > > > > > > Maybe this'll help you find something to do: > > > > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iU0Z0vBKrtQ > > > > > > Yes, it would be lovely to be able to compile the kernel with tcc but it > > > is not going to be trivial. As tcc is so simple it's actually not too much hassle, the biggest roadblocks should be gone; the usage of inline asm in the kernel is ... creative ... and hence the single pass nature of TCC and the C-asm integration pose some challenges ;) Also anything that requires inlining to remove dead but non-conforming code (like calling undefined functions) needs an alternative like macros expanding to zero, instead of a function returning zero. (I even have an limited inliner for tcc, but I didn't like it too much) (My interest was tcc, not kernel development, which is why I never did anything with that 4.6 kernel, I wanted to retain a stable and big known source base for tcc hackery. If someone is interested in kernel compiling that can change the picture of course; I think I at least remember most of the reasons for the kernel patches I had to do to make my tcc hackery easier :) ). > It would be good to start forward-porting and integrating some of the > fixes and even extend tcc to handle some of the gnuisms we're using in > the kernel so that we can build the kernel with it too. > > I can imagine having CONFIG_TCC - as long as that doesn't get too > intrusive and get in the way of things - and those who wanna build the > kernel with it, can enable it. For example... Ciao, Michael.
