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Hi folks, |
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|
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With the somewhat recent introduction of support for a wide variety of |
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SGI machines under gentoo, expanding to include all of Indy/Indigo2, |
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Origin, Octane, Indigo2 Impact (ip28), and O2, I've noticed more than |
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just a handful of new users have had problems when getting to the kernel |
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compile phase of the install. The problem is that on systems that only |
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run 64-bit kernels, you need a mips64-unknown-linux-gnu toolchain to |
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build the kernel. Since the userland is all 32-bit, the native |
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toolchain isn't good enough to compile the kernel. However, we do |
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provide a proper toolchain via the gcc-mips64 ebuild. Furthermore, |
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binutils supports mips64 by default, but symlinks must exist such that |
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we have mips64-unknown-linux-gnu-ld -> ld, etc. Both of these are |
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automatically provided during emerge system if you use the correct |
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profile, which is default-linux/mips/mips64/2005.0 currently. |
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|
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The problem is that all of our stages ship with |
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default-linux/mips/2005.0 as the default profile, which does *not* |
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provide gcc-mips64 and the binutils symlinks. Therefore if a user |
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didn't know any better and didn't change their profile appropriately, |
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they would be stuck while trying to build their kernel because the |
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native 32-bit toolchain in the userland will just spit out errors and |
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die when compiling the kernel. Of course, this is easily fixed by |
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emerging gcc-mips64 and running "binutils-config --mips", which will set |
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up a proper toolchain. However, by that time, the user is discouraged a |
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bit and inevitably finds our irc channel and whines that Gentoo is broken. |
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|
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Now, I have a few ideas for getting around this. Obviously whatever is |
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decided should be added to the documentation, but here are some ideas: |
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|
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A) Do nothing...document in the handbook that if your machine is 64-bit, |
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you *must* select the mips64 sub-profile. (I don't like this because |
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some folks may be confused as to why everything still works just fine |
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with the mips profile, and/or they will just skim over that and keep going) |
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|
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B) Similar to A, except ship stages without the profile set. That way, |
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folks really are stuck until they set the proper profile. (I don't like |
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this because they could still be confused and set the mips profile) |
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|
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C) Make default-linux/mips/ provide all the 64-bit stuff and get rid of |
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the mips64 sub-profile, since all of the SGI machines we support can run |
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64-bit kernels if you so choose (ip22 is the only system that supports a |
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32-bit kernel at this time). |
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|
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D) (Kumba's idea here...) Have machine specific profiles, e.g. |
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default-linux/mips/ip22, default-linux/mips/ip32, etc. (This could be |
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really useful because it would allow us to do some other machine |
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specific voodoo in the profile). |
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|
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Any thoughts? |
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|
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-Steve |
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-- |
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