[LEDE-DEV] Switching to upstream binutils for ARC

[Alexey Brodkin]

Hi Felix,

On Tue, 2017-02-07 at 19:46 +0300, Alexey Brodkin wrote:
> Hi Felix,
> 
> On Tue, 2017-02-07 at 10:43 +0100, Felix Fietkau wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Alexey,
> > 
> > I will soon push a change to switch to binutils 2.27 by default. It
> > seems that since 2.26, binutils has gained support for ARC.
> > Can we get rid of the ARC specific binutils version then, or does it
> > still have some important changes that are not upstream yet?
> 
> Indeed as of today we have almost everything ready for usage of upstream
> binutils as well as in GCC.
> 
> But all that might be pretty fragile because we still mostly use rather
> heavily patched forks (basically upstream masters + not-yet-upstreamed stuff).
> 
> That said I would prefer to move ARC to upstream binutils and GCC myself.
> I'm pretty sure I'll need to add a number of not-yet-upstreamed patches
> for both binutils and GCC and obviously that will be much easier for me.
> 
> Let me take a look how broken it is without extra patches and we will
> see how to proceed with it.

So I was able to build and even run stuff for ARC locally out of
most recent upstream gcc 6.3.0 and binutils 2.27.
That's a good news.

But still those versions are missing tons of our patches so I wouldn't
expect a thing that I built to be rock solid and if something a bit more
complicated than minimal set of apps could be built at all.
In fact I had to apply 80+ patches on gcc so that's definitely not the most
fancy solution... even though these are all in gcc's master tree as of today.

Now both gcc 7.0 and binutils 2.28 are about to be released and there we will
have almost everything we might need (sans a patch or two). In that light my
question would be what's the plan regarding gcc 7.0 & binutils 2.28 in Lede/OWrt?

-Alexey

P.S. If of any interest I may send out my local changes as RFC.