Re: DAC960 and GCC
On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Wakko Warner wrote:
> There's no gcc in debian that will compile the DAC960 module on my alpha
> noritake system (as1000a) gcc-3.0 doesn't compile 2.4.17 right, gcc 2.95.4
> bombs with an error compiling the module, and gcc 2.95.2 (debian potato)
> just eats all memory and bomb compiling that module.
This is an old problem, but one that was unfortunately never fixed. Can
you try compiling it without optimisation? IIRC, it still won't compile,
but it may be worth checking again.
> Someone running rh 7.1 and gcc 2.96 was able to compile a kernel for me and
> it's working great.
DAC960's are strange beasts in some Alphas (only certain firmware revs
work and they're not easily upgradable since the flash chips are hard to
find now), so I personally never saw a great need to bump it up on my list
of things to look into. Plus, I don't have a DAC960 to test with anyway,
so I couldn't verify anything other than the "it compiles now" type of
results.
> Why is there no gcc 2.96 for alpha (or for that matter, no other arch than
> ia64)
Because it's an abomination unto the GNU. Just kidding. RedHat
"fathered" 2.96; it was never an official GNU release. In the beginning
of 2.96, it had some major problems with it and it would've been
impossible to turn to the main GCC folks to fix those problems since they
didn't sanction the release (and they had made enough changes to the CVS
tree since RH found a snapshot that they could call "2.96" that they
couldn't easily backport many of the changes). So, that means that, if we
needed to file bugs, we'd have to rely on RedHat as our "support". I
don't know about you, but I wouldn't consider having Debian rely on RedHat
support for something as important as the toolchain :-P
In the IA-64 case, though, it's a little different. Until 3.1 comes out,
I don't think IA-64 support in even the 3.x series is fantastic. Most of
the work that is being done is being done in either gcc mainline CVS
(which we don't want to package for main Debian use for a number of
reasons) or against the 2.96 sources that were released by RedHat and
affiliates. I wasn't in on the decision-making process with IA-64, but I
can agree with their choice as far as that goes even in hindsight. The
platform is new enough that a working toolchain is needed...doesn't matter
where it comes from yet. Once the GCC make an official release that works
well on IA-64, I have no doubts that they'll be switching over to an
official release for their default compiler.
C
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