Re: odd endianness toolchains for crosstool

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 1:43 PM Jason A. Donenfeld <Jason@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 10:46:45AM +0200, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > The situation on my end is that I'm planning to migrate my main workstation
> > (which I'm building the compilers on) to an arm64 machine soon, and
> > will then need to set it all up again. I don't really want to change much before
> > then to avoid changing things twice.
>
> Ahh, okay, so probably crosstool won't be viable for me for a while. Are
> your existing scripts fairly reproducible and easy? I suppose I could
> just build my own if I can't find another project supplying light
> compilers.

The scripts are fairly solid, but the original git tree is no longer available
and my version has a couple of local changes with a bit of a dirty history
from adding support for cross-compiling the compilers themselves to
do the canadian-cross arm64 and ppc64le hosted ones.

There is another fork of the same tree on
https://github.com/nathanchance/buildall

The main issue with building distributable binaries is to actually build
them on an older rootfs to avoid linking against a newer glibc, and
to ensure the dependencies for gcc are statically linked. Without that,
the output is too distro specific.

> > I've added Nick to Cc, as he's experimenting with a clang based toolchain
> > that we can put on kernel.org along with the gcc toolchains, and that
> > would probably include a musl based sysroot roughly the same set of
> > architectures that you are testing on already. Possibly we could reuse the
> > same user space between clang and gcc.
>
> I personally have no use for compilers with user spaces. My test harness
> builds musl as part of it. It's really the quickest part of the entire
> harness to build. I also probably won't switch things over to clang;
> Google has the resources to do that themselves. Basically all I need is
> the boring nolibc compilers for a few extra platforms, and for the ppc
> one to build with the mentioned flags.

I suppose the only thing you are missing is libgcc (or libcompiler-rt)
for those platforms. I had a closer look into what is or can be included
here, and I see that my builds include multiple versions on some of
the  architectures, but not on others:

aarch64-linux/lib/gcc/aarch64-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
alpha-linux/lib/gcc/alpha-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/hs/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/archs/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/hs38/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/hs38_linux/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/arc700/libgcc.a
arc-linux/lib/gcc/arc-linux/11.1.0/nps400/libgcc.a
arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabi/11.1.0/libgcc.a
...
powerpc-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
powerpc-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc-linux/11.1.0/64/libgcc.a
powerpc-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc-linux/11.1.0/64/le/libgcc.a
powerpc-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc-linux/11.1.0/le/libgcc.a
powerpc-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc-linux/11.1.0/32/le/libgcc.a
powerpc64-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc64-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
powerpc64-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc64-linux/11.1.0/32/libgcc.a
powerpc64-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc64-linux/11.1.0/32/le/libgcc.a
powerpc64-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc64-linux/11.1.0/le/libgcc.a
powerpc64-linux/lib/gcc/powerpc64-linux/11.1.0/64/le/libgcc.a
mips-linux/lib/gcc/mips-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
mips-linux/lib/gcc/mips-linux/11.1.0/n32/libgcc.a
mips-linux/lib/gcc/mips-linux/11.1.0/64/libgcc.a
mips64-linux/lib/gcc/mips64-linux/11.1.0/libgcc.a
mips64-linux/lib/gcc/mips64-linux/11.1.0/32/libgcc.a
mips64-linux/lib/gcc/mips64-linux/11.1.0/64/libgcc.a

So on powerpc, there are already both big-endian and
little-endian binaries, but arm and mips only have one of the
two. I asked our local compiler experts, and they suggested
that one can add further multiarch-configs like the one
in gcc/config/arm/t-aprofile to allow building for a different
subset of the hundreds of possible configurations.

the t-aprofile builds libgcc for a couple of combinations of
cpu architecture level and FPU ABIs, but they are all the
same endianess. gcc/config/rs6000/t-linux64lebe is the
corresponding file for powerpc that enables all combinations
of 32/64 and be/le.

> > I've also looked at other projects that do qemu based testing, everyone
> > seems to be missing one or two architectures out of a common set,
> > https://tinyurl.com/linux-architectures is where I keep my data.
>
> If the compilers are there, and they can build a working musl, and QEMU
> will boot it, and I can work out a minimal kernel .config that doesn't
> take a long time to compile, then it'll get included in the CI. So in
> theory, I should be able to expand the portfolio of architectures I'm
> using.

Adding riscv and s390 should indeed be fairly simple to add,
and you can probably just take a look at what ktest does for them.

You have a good point about the minimal kernel config, which makes
sense for testing a single thing, but of course others generally want
to test a 'defconfig' build that is closer to what users would actually
run.

> > building and running the most common subset of these in one place
> > in the kernel tree where at least wireguard, kunit and tuxrun can
> > share the setup for qemu.
>
> I have little interest in that kind of abstraction unfortunately.

Ok, fair enough.

      Arnd