Re: Welcome to the list!
2016-11-09 11:53 Paul van der Vlis:
Hello Manuel and others,
I will hope to have more time as the end of the year comes closer and
review the situation. At the moment I have ~600 source packages built
(~2000 binary packages, I think) and mostly working so I've been
building many of these packages natively, although with the caveats
that changes in glibc and other basic libraries might render this
useless.
Maybe they need to be build again, but I don't think the work will be
useless.
Unfortunately if there are ABI incompatibilities that prevent all
binaries to work, it will be a major hassle. A lot of the work is
untangling dependency cycles and things that are a real pain in the
neck. Let's see...
Some key packages typically installed by debootstrap are still missing
due to circular dependencies, or still cross-compiled but not compiled
natively/cleanly.
Maybe you can tell a bit about the major problems in the toolchain, and
if somebody is allready working on it.
There was a problem in glibc a while ago having very annoying
consequences, it prevented file locking to work properly, and thus dpkg
to refuse to install packages. I just had to unpack them on the disk
image loop-mounted from another system -- and not all packages are
amenable to work just by unpacking.
There have been other subtle problems, some still ongoing, for example
fork() or exec() calls not working correctly or "make" failing with some
recursive targets. I think that these are subtle problems/bugs of
syscalls or glibc, or glitches from cross-compiling (some of them went
away when compiling natively).
Happily, though, I have a quite usable system that can compile complex
packages, so in a way it's quite amazingly usable/mature.
For example I got compiled Perl many months ago, and Python 2.7 in the
last few hours :)
And about your setup. I've heard in a private mail you are using
risc-qemu for building. Other people could do the same. Maybe we could
publish a working qemu disk image and setup?
I am trying to create a bootstrappable set, something that can be
installed with "debootstrap" or so, and not all packages are ready, and
the "biggies" like GCC and glibc are compiled from upstream and not
proper Debian packages.
Some of the ones which are ready have very crude hacks (e.g. copying
files pre-processed in an amd64 system, touching empty files, moving
directories by hand...), and I guess that I would need to provide the
source for the GPL ones. There's nothing "secret", but it's a hassle to
manage with hundreds of packages needing small/dirty hacks.
So I was hoping to have a system that can compile the bootstrappable set
"cleanly" without any modifications whatsoever (and not disabling
dependencies/features either), and that one to be published so that
people can use to work on it.
Also, for many months, I was hoping that the main things were upstreamed
(binutils, gcc and glibc), and the first one was just upstreamed but not
the rest.
And maybe somebody can tell about a setup with FPGAs.
What hardware are you using? Will cheap hardware be useable?
I don't know much about FPGAs so I will pass on replying to this :)
Does somebody know more about the coming lowrisc hardware?
Haven't kept up with news on that front lately.
Cheers.
--
Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo <manuel.montezelo@gmail.com>
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