[Buildroot] Toolchain problems. About toolchains in Buildroot ?

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Le Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:48:26 +0100,
Peter Korsgaard <jacmet@uclibc.org> a ?crit :

> What problems do you have with the buildroot toolchains?

Two problems, on ARM (the only architecture I'm using Buildroot for) :

 * EABI kernel build failures. The kernel couldn't find some weird eabi
   function, which is implemented in libgcc, but the kernel is not
   supposed to be linked with libgcc. It's probably due to incorrect
   code being generated by the compiler. I can report the exact is
   required.

 * A DirectFB+Gtk build with a sample Hello World application (not
   using Gtk, but linked against Gtk) crashes on start-up
   ("Segmentation fault"). Seems that the crash is occuring somewhere
   in uClibc, but I'm unsure.

Both of these problems go away when I use an external toolchain built
with crosstool-ng.

Generally-speaking, it seems that the toolchain in Buildroot are not
maintained as much as it would be necessary to keep properly working
toolchains. It seems that Bernhard Fischer is doing some work on this
front, but on his Git tree, and the changes don't get integrated back
into Buildroot SVN (fragmentation is a shame, IMO).

And again, my opinion on this is that Buildroot should probably focus
on one thing: building root filesystems. Building toolchains is another
job, usually done separatly from building the root filesystem, so
having two different projects makes sense. The crosstool-ng guys are
doing a pretty good job, keeping their scripts up-to-date with the
latest versions of gcc, binutils, uClibc and others, creating stable
releases, getting quite some user testing and feedback, etc. They also
provide an interesting feature: generate toolchain for glibc, uClibc,
and eglibc. So, I'd say that instead of fragmenting the energies it
would probably be nice if Buildroot focused on building root
filesystems, leaving the work of building the toolchain to
crosstool-ng. But that's just my opinion, of course.

Sincerly,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers and embedded Linux development,
consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com