HEADS UP: Toolchain changes coming soon. (Octeon, n32, n64)

[Juli Mallett]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 02:17, C. Jayachandran <c.jayachandran at gmail.com> wrote:
> That clears it up, thanks.  Looking at the patch, most of the changes
> seems to be in binutils, are these from a specific version of
> binutils?  I am asking because I'm not sure how the FreeBSD toolchain
> is synchronized across architectures - are all architectures at the
> same version of binutils, or can each architecture decide to update
> its part of the tool-chain.

I pulled some files from a slightly more modern version of binutils
from a Cavium SDK than ours and reduced differences to make the
relevant parts of code match the older binutils API we provide, while
still providing the newer opcode interface and a couple of nearby
things.

>> Is there specific functionality you need in GCC?
>
> Netlogic has some updates for GCC and binutils in its SDK. But they
> are not critical, and we have not merged these into the FreeBSD.  I
> was not sure if I can get these changes into FreeBSD directly.

If Netlogic can GPLv2 their specific changes or reimplement them
relative to FreeBSD's toolchain, I think we would want to coordinate
to get them into the tree.  Our goal is generally to produce a
fully-working self-hosting system out of the box.  That may change at
some point, especially if Warner's work on supporting external
toolchains better pans out well, but I think for now it's a reasonable
goal.

Note that my understanding is that David O'Brien is working on
bringing in the last GPLv2 binutils which will make the differences
required for mips64r2 and Octeon substantially-smaller and I would
hope for Netlogic processors as well.

Thanks,
Juli.