powerpc64 gcc compiler ...

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

Hello,

I am currently trying to build a ppc64 aware gcc 3.4 package, as
mentioned in Matthias post : 

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-gcc/2004/debian-gcc-200403/msg00021.html

First, i found that this gcc-3.4 package in experimental wasn't yet
built on powerpc, which i did. It did output lot of FAILs in the tests
later on, but i am not sure this is worrying or not. It builds simple
binaries without problems. But it didn't build the biarch toolchain, so
it was of no use for me.

After a bit of investigation, i found out that :

  --target=powerpc64-linux --with-cpu=default32

Where needed for gcc-3.4 to build the biarch toolchain, and default to
32bit binaries, unless the -m64 option is given to gcc-3.4.

I looked a bit at the source code, and found out that other 64bit arches
did :

  # sparc64 build --------------------
  ifeq ($(DEB_TARGET_ARCH),sparc)
    biarch := yes
    with_lib64gcc := yes
    with_lib64cxx := yes
  endif

So i guess a good solution would be to do something similar for powerpc,
not sure if this would include the --with-cpu=default32 though.

I don't really know what the plans are for ppc64 support, but i hear
that biarch userland is a post sarge issue. Also, i understood that we
will not switch over to gcc 3.4 for sarge, which is the reason why it is
in experimental currently. Or maybe it would be possible to have gcc 3.4
in unstable and later sarge, without it necessarily being the default ? 

What i am trying to do, and what would be nice, would be to have at
least ppc64 kernels for the sarge release, since some boxes may need
this and will have trouble with 32bit kernels. Don't know if this is
realistic, but it seems to me that only gcc support is needed in order
to achieve that. I hear that a 64bit procps and module-init-tools will
be needed too, and probably a libncurses, which may be a problem, but
let's worry about this later.

Anyway, my question here is if you would consider it reasonable to
enable the powerpc biarch toolchain, and have it default to 32bit for
gcc 3.4 ? This should cause no problem for ordinary powerpc, but would
allow to build ppc64 stuff with the same toolchain. Am i correct with
this assumption ? I will try tomorrow to build this, but would it make
sense to enable this in the experimental powerpc packages ? And what
about the not gcc or cxx compilers ? 

Friendly,

Sven Luther