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

[C. Jayachandran]

On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Juli Mallett <jmallett at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 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.

Stock binutils and GCC works fine for XLR (it is mips64 compliant), so
XLR is self-hosting with the current FreeBSD MIPS tool-chain.  Our
patch for GCC is for adding 'xlr' machine description and march/mtune
options. The binutils patch is for a few XLR specific instructions for
which we currently '.word' in assembly for.  So both of these are not
really needed.

Also licensing should not be an issue here -  I'll have a go at this
once the other toolchain changes are in.

> 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.

JC.