Maverick toolchain

[Robbie Williamson]

On Wed, 2010-07-21 at 14:49 +0200, Matthias Klose wrote: 
> On 21.07.2010 10:00, Robbie Williamson wrote:
> > On Tue, 2010-07-20 at 21:45 +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:
> >> On 20.07.2010 21:03, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> >>> On 20/07/10 16:53, Robbie Williamson wrote:
> >>>> On 20/07/10 12:25, Matthias Klose wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>>> I suggest to enable the Linaro GCC on amd64, i386 and powerpc as well,
> >>>>> given the  comittment of the Linaro toolchain working group to
> >>>>> addressing potential regressions on amd64 and i386 too.
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Doko, thank you for the feedback. Given that we are midway through the
> >>>> release cycle, and that we have not done *any* system testing with the
> >>>> amd64 and i386 packages/kernels built using this toolchain, I'm
> >>>> concerned with making this change now.  As acting release manager, I
> >>>> propose we move to Linaro's GCC now for the armel flavor of Ubuntu
> >>>> 10.10, and make the change for amd64 and i386 in 11.04.
> >>>>
> >>>
> >>> I don't want to rock the RM boat, especially since I'm responsible for
> >>> the tighter timelines of 10.10, but this is a change which has been in
> >>> play since UDS, has had extensive analysis and a full rebuild test with
> >>> detailed examination. It's certainly not a new thing being raised at
> >>> this stage, and we agreed not to press the issue earlier only because
> >>> the offer was made to do the testing and decide then. It would be wrong
> >>> to have made that offer and then decline to make the change even after
> >>> the testing comes back as favourably as it did - next time, folks won't
> >>> be as willing to leave the door open for extended analysis.
> >>>
> >>> It's also quite material to the collaboration of Linaro and the rest of
> >>> the platform.
> >>
> >> Afaiu the biggest concern to the Linaro GCC is it's use for the kernel build.
> >> Apparently nobody including myself did explicitly communicate to the kernel team
> >> about the decision in the arm toolchain session (arm-m-tool-chain-selection).
> > In addition, nothing has ever been posted to ubuntu-devel or
> > ubuntu-devel-discuss about this, so I feel it may catch many Ubuntu
> > contributors and our derivatives off guard.  I know this was discussed
> > at UDS, but I don't know if most thought a session titled "ARM Toolchain
> > Selection" [1] encompassed toolchain selection for non-ARM architectures
> > as well.
> >
> > [1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/M/ARMToolChainSelection
> >
> >>
> >> If this is the only major concern I'd like to propose to use the gcc-4.4-fsf
> >> packages (which still need landing in maverick) to build the kernel (shipping
> >> the gcc-4.4-fsf binary with the name kgcc on the CDs).
> > Please talk to the kernel team and see what they say.
> 
> gcc-4.4-fsf packages are now available for amd64, i386 (armel still building) in
> https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-toolchain-r/+archive/ppa/+packages, providing a 
> binary `kgcc'.  This is currently a build with multilibs disabled. I'll update 
> the archive with a multilib'd compiler after the armel build is finished. If we 
> decide to upload this to maverick, this will provide at least a short term 
> solution for the Ubuntu/ARM team to build kernel images for the next alpha.
> 
>    Matthias

After speaking to members of the kernel team and tech board, it's been
decided to proceed with the original plan of switching to the Linaro
toolchain for armel, i386, and amd64 versions of Maverick.  Yeehaw! :)


-Robbie

-- 
Robbie Williamson                                      robbie at canonical.com 
Canonical, Ltd.                                   robbiew[irc.freenode.net]                               

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