[Aboriginal] Aboriginal Digest, Vol 24, Issue 3

[Isaac Dunham]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2013 13:30:37 -0800
Rob Landley wrote:

> > I switched since I got a nice little quad
> > core netbook sized laptop :) Sager NP6110... 16Gb ram should work  
> > great for testing stuff out. I mention it since you seem to enjoy 
> > that size factor but not the
> > customary loss in performance it did hurt the wallet a bit more  
> > though X.x.
> 
> Sounds like a nice machine. I've built under funtoo before, but it 
> was a while ago.

Looks nice indeed, especially compared to an Atom netbook (I have an aspire one as secondary).
In my experience, an ssd is probably the first thing a ~netbook needs. 5400 RPM hard drives are miserable.  But everything is pretty limited, especially if you use bloat like the full gnu (gnu's not usable?) environment.
 
> > I might get back around to testing sparc kernels if I have time....  
> > someone just sent
> > me a 150Mhz Hypersparc and a bunch of ram for my SS-10 so that should  
> > go swimmingly.
> 
> Ooh, very nice.
> 
> I was looking up sparc64 a while ago and it's another one like powerpc  
> 64 where they didn't bother to do a 64 bit userspace, just 64 bit  
> kernels and the very occasional application. Thus I'm not quite sure  
> how to add Aboriginal support to it. (Just a toolchain? Toolchain and  
> kernel using the 32 bit userspace? Except how would you build the  
> "occasional" 64 bit application? Where does libc enter into this?)
> 
>    http://www.debian.org/ports/sparc/

Debian's approach is "multilib", but that's a bit of a mess in its own right.  You might need their patches to make it work right.
Basically, you have 
-a 32-bit toolchain, but capable of targeting both 32-bit and 64-bit
-two builds of libc, one for 64-bit, one for 32-bit
-the rest of the environment built for 32-bit

> Then again, I'm told that's changing because gcc is dropping sparc32  
> support:
> 
>    http://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64
> 
> (Of course current gcc requires a C++ compiler on the host to build it,  
> so here's hoping clang/pcc/open64 matures quickly.)

What's left for open64 to mature in your opinion? From all I've seen, there are a few places where gcc is just catching up with them.

clang seems to be making headway, but pcc seems to be at the "well, it's more active than tcc..." level. It can bootstrap at least OpenBSD, though,

> Rob

-- 
Isaac Dunham <idunham at lavabit.com>