Re: [PATCH 3/3] CHANGELOG: Minimum toolchain requirements

[Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>]

On 21/03/2025 4:24 pm, Oleksii Kurochko wrote:
>
>
> On 3/20/25 4:59 PM, Andrew Cooper wrote:
>> Signed-off-by: Andrew Cooper <andrew.cooper3@citrix.com>
>> ---
>> CC: Anthony PERARD <anthony.perard@vates.tech>
>> CC: Michal Orzel <michal.orzel@amd.com>
>> CC: Jan Beulich <jbeulich@suse.com>
>> CC: Julien Grall <julien@xen.org>
>> CC: Roger Pau Monné <roger.pau@citrix.com>
>> CC: Stefano Stabellini <sstabellini@kernel.org>
>> CC: Oleksii Kurochko <oleksii.kurochko@gmail.com>
>> ---
>>  CHANGELOG.md | 3 +++
>>  1 file changed, 3 insertions(+)
>>
>> diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
>> index 9a5919585d43..4e333e608a96 100644
>> --- a/CHANGELOG.md
>> +++ b/CHANGELOG.md
>> @@ -7,6 +7,9 @@ The format is based on [Keep a Changelog](https://keepachangelog.com/en/1.0.0/)
>>  ## [4.21.0 UNRELEASED](https://xenbits.xenproject.org/gitweb/?p=xen.git;a=shortlog;h=staging) - TBD
>>  
>>  ### Changed
>> + - The minimum toolchain requirements have been increased to either:
>> +   - GCC 5.1 and Binutils 2.25, or
>> +   - Clang/LLVM 11
> I think we want here to specify for which architectures it was done as RISC-V, for example, uses
> different versions:
>  - GCC 12.2 or later
>  - GNU Binutils 2.39 or later
> And for clang the version will be 17 as:
>   f873029386dd415cd9caa78f600a593d9570c9ae("[BOLT] Add minimal RISC-V 64-bit support")
>   $ git tag --contains f873029386dd415cd9caa78f600a593d9570c9ae
>     llvmorg-17.0.0
>   ...
> I have some patch to build Xen RISC-V using clang-17 but I haven't sent to upstream yet as I am not
> really sure that if we need (or why we need) clang support just from the start.

The same reason why we got an almost-nothing build in CI first, and are
currently looking for a "hello world" message on boot.

Keeping it working as you go is much easier than retrofitting at a later
point, and supporting more than 1 of any $THING (not just compilers) is
good to prevent accidental reliance on an implementation specific property.

The only question is what version of Clang exists in Debian bookworm, as
that affects how easy/hard it is to add to CI.

According to https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=clang, bookworm
has Clang 14, while trixie has Clang 19.

So, how hard a limit is Clang-17?  Is Clang-14 doable or not?

Alternatively, we could start adding some trixie containers.  We have
passed the toolchain freeze (was 15th March), so the build container
should be stable now, even if it isn't quite released yet.

~Andrew