Date: Tue, 13 Jan 1998 09:20:25 +1100 (EST) From: John Birrell <jb@cimlogic.com.au> To: imp@village.org (Warner Losh) Cc: alpha@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Bootstrapping FreeBSD/Alpha Message-ID: <199801122220.JAA03370@freebsd1.cimlogic.com.au> In-Reply-To: <199801122137.OAA06273@harmony.village.org> from Warner Losh at "Jan 12, 98 02:37:06 pm"
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Warner Losh wrote:
> What does NetBSD/alpha use for tools? Out of the box as, et al from
> binutils? Or something that has been hacked special for the purpose
> that hasn't been merged back into the FSF sources yet?
There are a few issues which make the use of the NetBSD patches for
the toolchain problematic. The NetBSD patches were developed for CMU
based on the combined toolchain source that they get directly form
Cygnus. CMU have not released those patches for incorporation in the FSF
sources. To make matters worse, the patches were included in the FSF
sources sometime last year, but removed at the request of the author
when he complained.
So where does that leave us? We'll be using the version of gcc that
is currently in the tree (2.7.2.1) with the alpha config files added.
There are two FreeBSD config files in there at present that need
to be replaced by someone who develops a FreeBSD configuration
without refering to the NetBSD patches. These new config files
should also be submitted to NetBSD to allow them to solve their
ownership mess. The important thing here is that the new config
files are "new work" derived only from the existing (probably
Linux) files.
Either Peter Wemm or John Polstra (or someone else they nominate)
will import (parts of) the GNU binutils release 2.8.1 (the latest
one) and configure that for ELF on both i386 and alpha. They will
consider all CVS issues related to that work. Phew.
That work should happen sometime soon, subject to people's
work load. Until then we can just use the NetBSD binaries except
for gcc/cpp because we need the FreeBSD pre-defines.
> Finally, would people object to my adding the 11 lines of code to
> configure to make it grok the alpha-unknown-freebsd type so that
> ./configure -target alpha-unknown-freebsd has a chance of working?
Would you mind submitting that as a patch to either Peter Wemm or John
Polstra and allow them to do the upgrade in the manner that they see
fit. I guess you've noticed that the binutils stuff will default to
COFF format if it doesn't recognise the operating system name.
Jordan has a NetBSD/Alpha system available for anybody (?) who
wants to work on this stuff.
As for libc, I've sent a proposal for that to core and I'm waiting on
[comments] { OK | NOTOK }.
Regards,
--
John Birrell - jb@cimlogic.com.au; jb@netbsd.org; jb@freebsd.org
CIMlogic Pty Ltd, GPO Box 117A, Melbourne Vic 3001, Australia +61 418 353 137
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