[OE-core] OpenEmbedded and musl-libc

[Paul Barker]

On 21 March 2014 18:22, Khem Raj <raj.khem at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 5:34 AM, Paul Barker <paul at paulbarker.me.uk> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> musl-libc hit version 1.0.0 yesterday and is starting to look good to
>> me. It's basically a really small but very functional libc that would
>> suit embedded environments very well as an alternative to
>> eglibc/uclibc. I'm personally very interested in using it in my
>> projects and I also think it could fit in well with the aims of
>> poky-tiny.
>>
>> http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html gives some pretty useful info.
>>
>> I'm basically emailing to see if anyone else is interested in this or
>> if anyone has looked at using it before in OpenEmbedded as a google
>> for previous discussions didn't turn anything up.
>>
>> I'm currently very busy between various projects so I don't have time
>> to hack together a musl-libc recipe myself but I should have time to
>> help test it.
>
> it has been under my radar for a while. I have actually locally made
> toolchains with
> clang+musl and it seems to be coming along. its licensed differently thats
> the biggest attraction for folks who do static linking. Otherwise it still
> doesnt yet support variety of architectures that other libcs support. given
> now we have kconfig for eglibc too may be it fills in the nommu gap much
> like uclibc does today. I have some plans for 1.7 for adding it to OE
> may be in a layer
> of its own first and then migrate it to OE-core
>

Yea, that's the sort of approach I was expecting. Getting musl to
build is the easy bit, making it usable as the system libc for an
entire image is the difficult bit. I think at least initially we'd
need a few bbappends in a meta-musl layer to fix packages which don't
compile out-of-the-box with musl.

I don't think musl fills the nommu gap though - from the comparison
page I linked to it says musl doesn't support mmu-less
microcontrollers.

-- 
Paul Barker

Email: paul at paulbarker.me.uk
http://www.paulbarker.me.uk