Re: making egcs the primary compiler for sparc architecture?

[Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu>]

Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS <edmundo@rano.demon.co.uk> writes:

> > > subject says all; I see that sparc uses glib-2.1 and kernel-2.2.1, so
> > > this should not be a problem. Is there some other reason not make egcs
> > > the primary compiler for sparc?
> > >
> > > Thanks, the Debian EGCS maintainers.
> > 
> > None that I know of.

> In the 2.2.5 announcement Linus mentions that it is suspected that
> there are some problems with compiling the kernel with egcs:

> http://lwn.net/daily/2.2.5.html

> But using gcc-2.7.2.3 for the rest of eternity is probably not the best
> way of dealing with it ...

IIRC, these problems are with Intel only.  Using gcc on the sparc is a
very bad idea.  It produces bad code for anything involving "long
long" integers.  (Example, the binutils package has a hack in the
rules file to compile with egcs on the sparc because it stops working
when you compile it with gcc.)  We need to ditch gcc ASAP.  (I'm told
by one of the libc developers, I forget which one, that gcc should
_only_ be used to compile the intel kernel.)


Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu