Re: ARC rebootstrap prereq (was Re: switching ARC to 64-bit time_t )

Helmut Grohne
2020-03-26T06:19:30Z

Hi Vineet,

On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 05:25:58PM -0700, Vineet Gupta wrote:
> ARC glibc is still in works, but assuming that will happen in near future what
> other upstream prerequisites are needed. The obvious ones would be Linux kernel,
> gcc, binutils: all 3 of which are supported for ARC. From a quick glance at debian
> wiki pages, I presume *bootstrap is mostly done native, so needs qemu ? (full/user
> emulation ? And does qemu need to be upstream too ?

Given that I ran into the glibc issue, I can tell that at least
rudimentary arc support support is already available in Debian unstable
for binutils, linux and gcc. (Otherwise, I would not have come as far as
glibc.) Once glibc is in place, work can proceed on the Debian side.
guile, libatomic-ops, libffi, libgpg-error and nspr ususally need a
little upstream support. dpkg, gmp, openssl, and perl usually need
Debian-specific changes. I'd recommend looking into libatomic-ops and
libffi early. The other packages are usually simple.

The aim of rebootstrap is to create a package set for essential +
build-essential using cross builds without using any qemu. Beyond that
point, you'd switch to native building. Unless real hardware is
available, you'd need qemu after the reboostrap phase. Whether you use
full or user emulation is your choice, but I guess that you can speed up
builds using user emulation, because it allows you to mix and match
binaries. When you upstream your qemu is also your choice.

Please get in touch with me once a suitable glibc is packaged for Debian
unstable or experimental. Please use debian-cross@lists.debian.org or
irc.oftc.net #debian-bootstrap at that point. Alternatively, package a
glibc locally (like Arnd did).

Helmut