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Re: GCC and binutils updates for buster

Hi,

On 17/07/2018 17:56, Aurelien Jarno wrote:

Hi,

On 2018-07-16 17:59, Matthias Klose wrote:

The Debian release team lists toolchain support for our release architectures,
and according to [4], the amd64, i386, armel, armhf, arm64 architectures are
supported as primary architectures, and s390x is supported as a secondary
architectures.  Some notes on other candidates for release architectures:

  - armel: The armv4t default isn't used very much anymore, and we had
    issues in the past.

  - armhf: While arm-linux-gnueabihf is not explicitly listed as a primary
    architecture, I'm told that the arm-linux-armeabi triplet covers the
    hard float variants as well.

  - ppc64el: Not documented as primary architecture, but according to the
    backend maintainers the powerpc64-linux-gnu triplet includes the le variant.

  - mips*: There is no support for any mips-linux target either as a primary
    or secondary release architecture (only bare metal), which matches the
    experience with mips specific issues for the past Debian releases.

Could we ask the backends maintainers of the mipsisa64-elf backend,
similarly to what has been done for ppc64el? Last time I asked Matthew
Fortune almost 2 years ago, he told me that the embedded mipsisa64-elf
platform (a primary GCC platform) can be used to demonstrate pretty
much any bug in mips therefore making every mips architecture a primary
one.

Let ask him his opinion publicly. I have Cced: him.

Aurelien



[4] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/criteria.html
In terms of compiler support, i.e. codegen, then all MIPS compilers can be used (with appropriate options) to generate code suitable for Linux. There are a couple of minor things that may be configure time dependent but nothing that would mean a Linux triplet works sufficiently different to a bare metal to cause problems. The rest of the toolchain does diverge a bit but even that is relatively minor and the choice of targets for GCC does not necessarily mean that binutils or glibc is any less well tested for MIPS Linux triplets just because GCC doesn't list them as primary/secondary.
I'd suggest looking at whether there is something fundamentally problematic with MIPS Linux rather than just using the primary/secondary release target list. 

Matthew
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