Re: multiboot

[Marco Gerards <metgerards@student.han.nl>]

Johan Rydberg <jrydberg@night.trouble.net> writes:

> The initial problem was that AC_CHECK_SIZEOF doesn't work if you're
> cross-compiling.  I fixed this by using AC_COMPILE_CHECK_SIZEOF [1]
> instead.

This sounds right to me, but I do not see this in the patch...

> But the major problem is that parts of GRUB2 requires a C library to
> be installed, at least headers such as alloca.h and stdint.h.  Is this
> really a valid demand?  

Is this required for grubof?  IIRC those headers are not a part of the
C library, but a part of gcc or libgcc or so.  Am I right about that?

Instead of alloca we can also use something like:

...

{
 int foo[size]
 ...
}

In most cases that will remove the dependency on alloca.  IMHO it is
better not to use alloca.

> Another issue regarding BUILD_CC.  The normal convention is that if
> you want to build something that should run on the build machine, you
> use something similar to BUILD_CC.  That's why I think the following
> patch is self-explaining.

That sounds sane to me.  I assume this fixes Timothy's problem as
well.

> That brings us the next issue; BUILD_CC is used to build _everything_,
> including the host-specific object files, and since BUILD_CC is set to
> /usr/bin/gcc in my cross-compiler environment it will try to compile
> PPC assembler sources with a i386 compiler.  Not good.
>
> My suggestion is to create a new class for programs that should be
> host-specific, and let Utilities be compiled on the build machine.
> See the patch.  

Ok, that sounds sane.  But what if you really want to cross-compile a
complete system (including libc, GRUB, etc)?

Can you make one big patch with a changelog entry so it can be
committed after Okuji agrees with the patch?

Thanks,
Marco