From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Thomas Petazzoni Date: Tue, 1 Nov 2016 15:48:27 +0100 Subject: [Buildroot] [PATCH 1/1] Autobuilder: add powerpc64 and powerpc64le In-Reply-To: <955cacaf56560ef6d27555e5e969a576187daba3.1477975719.git.sam.bobroff@au1.ibm.com> References: <955cacaf56560ef6d27555e5e969a576187daba3.1477975719.git.sam.bobroff@au1.ibm.com> Message-ID: <20161101154827.3b5b652f@free-electrons.com> List-Id: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: buildroot@busybox.net Hello, On Tue, 1 Nov 2016 15:53:04 +1100, Sam Bobroff wrote: > Add autobuilder configuration for powerpc64le, with a Power8 CPU. > Add autobuilder configuration for powerpc64 (big endian), with a > generic PowerPC CPU. > > Signed-off-by: Sam Bobroff Thanks for this initial proposal. I'm replying to some of your questions, and asking some more below. > The powerpc64le configuration is set up for Power8 CPUs, because > that's where little endian support starts. > > The powerpc64 configuration is set up for a generic PowerPC CPU, as > that makes it as widely usable as possible but Power7 would be another > reasonable choice. Using a "reasonable" choice is probably better, i.e if you think Power7 is kind of the usually minimal machine to run PowerPC64 stuff, then the powerpc64 config should be using power7 IMO. > > I tried to follow the same style as the other configurations but I > should point out that: > * I did not prefix the name with "br-". I'm not sure what it means. It means "toolchain built by Buildroot", which is your case here. This is opposed to "Linaro toolchain", "Sourcery toolchain", etc. > * For the actual configuration (.config files) I cut and trimmed the > "Target options" section of a working Buildroot configuration. You should have used "make savedefconfig", which produces a file named defconfig that is automatically trimmed down. > * I haven't inlcuded a pre-built tool chain. I'd like to have one > but I assume it can be set up separately. That's the point I wanted to discuss. I think I'd prefer to have pre-built toolchains. Pre-built toolchains mean that people can much more quickly reproduce build failures, as they can re-use the pre-existing toolchain and just build the failing package. It *saves* a lot of time. Also, using pre-built toolchains means that our autobuilders CPU time is more dedicated into building packages than building the toolchain. The only drawback of pre-built toolchains is that they are not automatically rebuilt when the toolchains components are updated/patches. But I very regularly trigger a rebuild of the pre-built toolchains, at least whenever I see some gcc/binutils/libc changes, or when one of the person interested in a specific architecture/toolchain asks me to do so. So I think I'll just add a powerpc64/power7 pre-built toolchain and a powerpc64le/power8 pre-built toolchain, if that's OK with you. Thanks! Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering http://free-electrons.com