[oe] meta-linaro and toolchain-layer

[Khem Raj]

On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 5:43 PM, Denys Dmytriyenko <denis at denix.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 07, 2012 at 02:08:38PM -0700, Khem Raj wrote:
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>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Ken Werner @ Linaro has created a meta-linaro layer. I have created a
>> github repo of same here https://github.com/kraj/meta-linaro
>
> FWIW, I've been closely monitoring the progress of meta-linaro layer for past
> month and its status as applicable to meta-ti:
>
> https://lists.yoctoproject.org/pipermail/meta-ti/2012-March/000747.html
>
> When I tried it last time to build some of our machines in meta-ti, there were
> issues, but I didn't have time to follow up or investigate and I was busy with
> the BSP presentation at the time...

yes and I have tried to resolve those kinks. I am now able to build
systemd-image using
angstrom distro and the resulting image boots fine on qemuarm. It
needs a patch in
OE-Core first. which I will propose soon.

>
> As a parallel effort, I was looking into working on the prebuilt toolchain
> support - i.e. recipes to use binary Linaro toolchain in OE/Yocto. I grabbed
> the latest 2012.03 release before leaving for the BSP Summit and Linux Collab
> and will give it a try ASAP.

yes thats in there it just needs some testing

>
>
>> Moving forward soon gcc 4.7 will land in OE-Core and 4.6 will be
>> more or less retired. In natural progression it would move to
>> toolchain-layer if there are consumers of it.
>>
>> linaro is also working on gcc-4.7 improvements in  same manner as
>> 4.6  and there could be more tools e.g. gdb binutils etc. that could
>> be useful for armv7+ from that layer.
>>
>> I would like to propose few things we could do.
>>
>> Use gcc-4.6 from meta-linaro and retire it from toolchain-layer
>> which means toolchain layer only has gcc-4.5 and eventually
>> This also means that we don't move gcc-4.6 into toolchain-layer
>> when its relegated from OE-Core
>>
>> In similar fashion add recipes for gcc-linaro-4.7 whenever linaro
>> makes first 4.7 based release
>>
>> Does anybody see downsides to this approach ?
>
> Sounds like a decent plan, but we need to validate the newest toolchain
> versions with the real hardware before making the switch and dropping the old
> versions - 4.5 is still the most stable build for me and the broad range of
> architectures and platforms I work with at TI from ARM9 to Cortex-A15...
>

I dont plan to touch 4.5 recipes for now. It will remain in
toolchain-layer as it is.
its 4.6 onwards that I want us to be getting from meta-linaro.

>
>> This could mean that distro may have multiple compilers for different
>> architectures e.g. linaro toolchain for arm
>> architecture and may be OE-Core provided toolchain for rest of them
>>
>> another option is that we do the same thing where we cherry-pick
>> linaro patches into toolchain-layer and append them on top gcc from
>> OE-Core which we have been doing with 4.6 it does mean extra work
>> validation and maintenance that I would like to avoid.
>
> --
> Denys
>
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