Thanks for the clarification.  Some of the information floating around out
there is a bit vague and piecing together an answer has been somewhat of a
challenge.  You did it in about 2 paragraphs.

This really answers most of the questions I've been trying to figure out for
the last many months.  I new it had to be possible as X was running on this
machine (Compaq RH 7.3 distro), prior to my building out the Gentoo.

Things to do on my part:

1.    Check my kernel build to confirm the floating point completion is
enabled in kernel
2.    Add mieee to my CFLAGS (my CXXFLAGS pick-up my CFLAGS)
3.    Try the USE="dlloader" flag
3a.    alternatively try patching the Xorg elf-loader

Brian Parkhurst.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: <kloeri@g.o>
To: <gentoo-alpha@g.o>
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2004 7:36 PM
Subject: Re: [gentoo-alpha] ebuild update for Xorg-x11


> Just to clear up any possible confusion regarding both -mieee and PIC
code.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> There's basically two ways to solve this:
> 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.
> 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.
>
> Hope this clears up the confusion (if any).
>
> Regards,
> Bryan Ã~stergaard
> Gentoo/Alpha developer
>
> --
> gentoo-alpha@g.o mailing list
>
>


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