[Buildroot] [PATCH 1/1] Autobuilder: add powerpc64 and powerpc64le

[Sam Bobroff <sam.bobroff@au1.ibm.com>]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2016 at 03:48:27PM +0100, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
> 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 <sam.bobroff@au1.ibm.com>
> 
> 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.

That's fine. Let's make it Power7.

> > 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.

Thanks.

> > * 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.

Ah, of course :-)

> > * 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.

It is, thanks very much! :-)

Cheers,
Sam.