[LinuxBIOS] help from ubuntu and FC6 experts

[Hamish Guthrie]

Hi Guys,

I still monitor a lot of what is going on on the LinuxBIOS list. I am 
now doing a lot of work on ARM and MIPS stuff, in which environments a 
cross-compilation is required ... well also, in most of my embedded x86 
stuff I maintain I now also use a cross-compilation toolchain so that I 
can use uClibc.

Maybe it would be an idea to create a very simple LinuxBIOS toolchain 
system where from a small SVN download, one can have a clean build 
environment using a pseudo cross-compile environment with a clean 
compiler per the 'latest' LinuxBIOS suggestion.

I personally use either Buildroot or another really interesting 
environment called openwrt (which has a really neat build environment 
aimed at the low-cost broadcom chip-based router environment), but 
essentially with these environments, one does an SVN checkout which 
downloads a series of scripts and makefiles, and from that a make 
creates a completely new toolchain from the specified known sources.

The really great thing about this is that one then has a KNOWN toolchain 
and all compiles are done with this KNOWN toolchain. Removes a whole lot 
of crap from the entire build environment, and, it generally works on 
ANY Linux platform - sure, there are some issues on OSX etc, but it does 
sure make a clean Linux build environment.

This may be a resolution to the screwed toolchains supplied in certain 
distros. I personally stopped using ANY flavour of redhat about 5 years 
ago when they released 7.1 with totally screwed beta compilers, which 
just broke everything. Since then I have used SuSE and have mostly never 
looked back. I have never used any RH or Fedora distro since then, 
purely because I have no idea what they will incorporate in the next 
release. At least by using the core code, one has a bit of security in 
knowing what one is dealing with .... ever tried to tell RH that they 
introduced a bug in the compiler toolchain??? I think it would probably 
have fallen on deaf ears. I must also point out that since 7.1, RedHat 
have insisted on creating their own 'patched' versions of GCC which may 
work for them, but for generic sources, there are frequently issues. 
(Especially when cross-compiling).

Just my tuppence!

Hamish

ron minnich wrote:
> On 1/23/07, Segher Boessenkool <segher at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
> 
>> So you should just try it out somewhere in your build system --
>> gcc -fno-stack-protector -S -xc - < /dev/null -o /dev/null    or
>> something similar, grab the return code -- and that's all you need
>> to do.
> 
> we'd always managed to avoid this kind of ugliness, but I guess we
> have no choice.
> 
> What's going to get interesting is when the form that this test takes
> gets broken by the various distros :-)
> 
> Some expert person want to try out a fix? If not, I guess I will.
> 
> ron
> 
>