Gentoo Archives: gentoo-alpha

From: kloeri@g.o
To: gentoo-alpha@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-alpha] ebuild update for Xorg-x11
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:36:42
Message-Id: 20041027023635.GB2649@n610c.example.org
In Reply to: RE: [gentoo-alpha] ebuild update for Xorg-x11 by Brian Parkhurst
1 Just to clear up any possible confusion regarding both -mieee and PIC code.
2
3 Alpha processors prior to ev6 require a little help from libc / the kernel to be IEEE compatible. Most code require this as Aron already mentioned. You need to add -mieee to CFLAGS and it's cousin CXXFLAGS as well as enable floating point completion in the kernel for this to work. Stuff like opengl will probably break without this support.
4
5 Regarding the possible PIC issues: shared libraries should be compiled -fPIC (or -fpic) or you'll get linking errors on some archs. x86 is mostly unaffected by this but you'll find that alpha complains loudly if you'll try to link PIC and non-PIC code. Usually this results in errors during the compilation aborting your emerge. Xfree and xorg-x11 is a little different as it loads the driver modules dynamically at run-time using it's own elf loader. This is also the reason that you'll see 'unsupported elf relocation type' errors - the built-in elf loader doesn't support all the relocation types that binutils does.
6
7 There's basically two ways to solve this:
8 1. Patch the X elf loader to support all relocation types. There's some patches floating around already that does this - at least to some extent.
9 2. Use dlload() instead of the built-in elf loader. You can turn on this behaviour using USE="dlloader" and remerging xfree / xorg-x11. Beware that this hasn't received as much testing yet as the built-in elf loader but it's used by the Gentoo hardened project at least.
10
11 Hope this clears up the confusion (if any).
12
13 Regards,
14 Bryan Østergaard
15 Gentoo/Alpha developer
16
17 --
18 gentoo-alpha@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-alpha] ebuild update for Xorg-x11 Brian Parkhurst <brianp@×××××××.net>