[LEDE-DEV] [PATCH 2/2] toolchain/arc: update to the most recent release arc-2017.09

[Alexey Brodkin]

Hi Hauke,

On Wed, 2018-01-24 at 21:43 +0100, Hauke Mehrtens wrote:
> On 01/24/2018 06:26 PM, Evgeniy Didin wrote:
> > This commit finally bumps ARC tools to the most recent arc-2017.09 release version.
> > 
> > ARC GNU tools of version arc-2017.09 bring some quite significant changes like:
> >  * Binutils v2.29 with additional ARC patches
> >  * GCC 7.1.1 with additional ARC patches
> > 
> > More information on this release could be found here: 
> >   https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__github.com_foss-2Dfor-2Dsynopsys-2Ddwc-2Darc-2Dprocessors_toolchain_releases_tag_arc-2D2017
> > .09-2Drelease&d=DwICaQ&c=DPL6_X_6JkXFx7AXWqB0tg&r=lqdeeSSEes0GFDDl656eViXO7breS55ytWkhpk5R81I&m=2rUJ8ayGY-
> > 54h0qn7dft_Zi3T1jFwJ88tA46p6c9l_I&s=U9snLQpnWd5Ku9JtYuf1pnf0YOcXzlrV5CnhDxTAepU&e= 
> > 
> > Signed-off-by: Evgeniy Didin <Evgeniy.Didin at synopsys.com>
> > CC: Alexey Brodkin <abrodkin at synopsys.com>
> > CC: John Crispin <john at phrozen.org>
> > ---
> 
> Would it be possible to use upstream gcc 7, upstream binutils 2.29 and
> upstream gdb 8 instead of the special arc versions?
> If you need some extra patches you can add them to the existing patches
> directory.

That's perfectly possible even though there're still some patches that didn't make
its way into latest releases of GCC and Binutils.

So the plan was to first bump versions of our tarballs and see how it goes
and if all goes smooth switch to upstream releases.

Otherwise if we switch right from much older tools based on GCC 6.3 (if I'm not mistaken)
and Binutils (2.27 or what) to GCC 7.2 and Binutils 2.29 chances are much higher that
something goes wrong and we'll spend much more time on fixing things.

> If this is not possible will this be possible with the next major
> versions of gcc, binutils and gdb?
> 
> I would like to get rid of most of the arc specialties and make arc
> behave more like all the other targets.

That's very well understood and we're very close to this.
Also note we have working glibc for ARCv2 (read archs48) which is being actively
reviewed on glibc's mailing list. Unfortunately it looks like ARC port won't be
a part of the next glibc's release [mostly because with pure upstream tools we're
getting a bit too much of failures in glibc's test-suite] but for the next one
I hope we'll be well prepared.

-Alexey