Re: [PATCH 0/2] alpha: enable building with clang

[Nick Desaulniers]

On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 8:28 PM Matt Turner <mattst88@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 17, 2026 at 7:16 PM Nick Desaulniers
> <ndesaulniers@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > On Mon, Aug 03, 2026 at 01:08:40PM -0400, Matt Turner wrote:
> > > > Two small patches to let the alpha kernel build with clang.
> > >
> > I'm curious, since we've yet to have such a case of an out of tree
> > llvm backend, what's your plan, if any, to upstream your backend in
> > llvm-project proper? Perhaps as an experimental backend?  We have bugs
> > filed in our issue track for m68k which is experimental (but upstream)
> > in LLVM.
>
> It builds a kernel that boots in qemu and on real hardware.

Wild.  Where did you even get real hardware? I know very little about Alpha.

>
> As of two days ago, it's capable of building itself and the 373
> packages of a Gentoo stage3 + a few other things. These include glibc
> and other core components (in a qemu-backend container on a fast
> multicore amd64 system).

I haven't kept up with Adhemerval's work on building glibc with clang,
but pretty wild to hear about glibc building with clang period, for
alpha no less.

>
> I would very much prefer to have the backend upstream, and I plan to
> start a discussion on discourse.llvm.org this week. I think an
> experimental backend is probably the limit of what makes sense for
> Alpha?

I agree. An RFC on discourse is the way to go. I'd use m68k as an example.

>
> If you have advice on going about this, I would welcome it (privately
> or in reply to this thread).
>
> Current diffstat is
>
> 461 files changed, 29735 insertions(+), 88 deletions(-)

Only advice is that if any of that was AI generated, please do take
the time to review LLVM's AI policy.  Reviewers have been getting
crunched by low quality AI commits recently, and are a bit salty all
around.

https://llvm.org/docs/AIToolPolicy.html

>
> of which {llvm,lld,clang}/test is
>
> 266 files changed, 9871 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)
>
> Currently reviewing and cleaning up, so the numbers will change.



-- 
Thanks,
~Nick Desaulniers