MIPS toolchain

[Jayachandran C.]

On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 2:33 PM, Robert Watson <rwatson at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 29 Jul 2011, James Jones wrote:
>
>> Does anyone have a prebuilt MIPS tool chain?
>
> For FreeBSD-related MIPS work, I generally use the FreeBSD "toolchain"
> target followed by the "buildenv" environment, but that requires first
> building a cross-toolchain using TARGET_ARCH and TARGET.  However, the
> result is a pretty sane compiler, linker, etc, setup for the MIPS of your
> choice (we tend to use mips64eb).
>
> We also use the MIPS-provided SDE toolchain for Linux at the CL, but that
> appears to be out of maintenance, and I haven't found its bug density to be
> any lower, really, than the even more ageing FreeBSD versions of the tools.

Yes, the FreeBSD MIPS tool-chain is pretty good in both the cross
compile and native compile setup.  For Linux, the CodeSourcery G++
Lite version of GCC is pretty good and easy to setup, if you want a
relatively newer version.

> In fact, there are some toolchain bugs I'm running into that manifest only
> in the SDE toolchain and not the FreeBSD toolchain.  (Mind you, Philip has
> commented that in building Uboot for MIPS, he's found FreeBSD bugs that
> don't appear in the SDE toolchain, so mileage varies).

Any idea what the bugs where? If there are fixes that can be
backported without license issues, we take take a look at this.

> We're greatly looking forward to MIPS support for LLVM, which currently
> appears very premature indeed.  Someone from MIPS appears to be contributing
> to it, however, and we (cl.cam.ac.uk) hope to provide some implementation
> support for that effort in the immediate future.

JC.