[Toybox] Blogging...

[Rob Landley]

On 11/20/2011 10:31 PM, Jens Staal wrote:
>>
>> So my point to this is you might want to go read:
>>
>>  http://landley.net/notes-2011.html#18-11-2011
>>
> 
> I saw in this blog post that you also would like an alternative
> compiler able to compile linux. LLVM/Clang can compile a patched
> kernel (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/slides/2011/lfcs/lfcs2011_llvm_lelbach.pdf).
> A disadvantage is that it is a C++ program which still depends on
> several GNU things (binutils, stdlibc++) on linux.

Yup, I've been following that.  I've also been following pcc, Open64,
and (to a lesser extent) tinycc.

Alas, of all those only tinycc seems to have its own assembler and
linker.  The rest build on top of binutils.  (Not sure about pcc, I need
to poke them again...)

> I recently saw that there was a "bounty" for being able to compile
> Linux with PCC (http://bsdfund.org/bundle/), and this compiler already
> can compile the FreeBSD kernel and most of the openBSD base system, I
> think.

Yeah, I saw that several months back.

I believe building pcc requires lex and yacc (so more dependencies than
the gcc version I'm using, and way more than tinycc), in addition to
requiring binutils (and thus not fully solving the problem).

> tcc could compile linux back in the 2.4 days I think.

tcc could compile a modified subset of the linux kernel.  The tccboot
page listed the things that it still needed.  I was working on dealing
with the backlog in my tinycc for (http://landley.net/code/tinycc) but
the project that overshadowed mine is a windows-only thing that's made
no progress on building the linux kernel in the past 5 years, due to
lack of interest.

I blatered about all this at some length in 2008 when I hosted a
compiler BOF at OLS.  (I was unaware that "hosted" meant "people would
ask me questions instead of talking amongst themselves", but oh well.)

http://free-electrons.com/pub/video/2008/ols/ols2008-rob-landley-linux-compiler.ogg

Alas, 3 years later I'm still waiting for most of the same things from
most of the same projects...

Rob

 1321912109.0