[gentoo-sparc] Re: Official SPARC64 Port

[Mike Frysinger]

On 28 Jan 2016 18:06, Alex McWhirter wrote:
> It's also worth noting that at this moment i am not an official Gentoo
> developer, although i am working towards having that goal met in the
> very near future. So at this point it's possible all of my work is junk
> as no one has really looked over it but me :p, so keep that in mind.

you don't have to be a dev to get your work merged.  you just have to
be a dev to do the final push yourself.  so if you have changes that
you think are ready to go now, we can get them merged.

> pciutils will not compile on sparc64, which i believe could be udev
> related. See the error below.
>
> ../../lib64/libudev.so: Only registers %g[2367] can be declared using
> STT_REGISTER
>
> It seems like systemd also has a similar issue.
> https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19019

that bug indicates it's a bug when using gold.  so if things are working
fine w/ld.bfd, then it's fine to move forward.  that bug also makes it
sound like there's something fundamentally broken in gold that udev just
happens to trip over, so we'd simply say gold isn't yet supported for
sparc.

> Originally it was decided to use the old sparc keyword for sparc32 and
> sparc64, but in this case we have an app that will compile on sparc32
> but not sparc64. How should this be handled? A new keyword would be a
> pain, so is there another way of dealing with this?

let's ignore the bfd-vs-gold aspect and just assume that it's a situation
where sparc64 always fails and sparc32 always works, and there's no way
to fix the problem.  if that truly is the case, packages can be masked in
the sparc64-specific linux profile.  it's a bit heavy weight, but since
this scenario rarely comes up, it's not that big of a deal.

a more pertinent example would probably be something like grub-0.  the
code fundamentally assumes 32-bit everywhere, and links against 32-bit
system libs, so it's not worth our effort to try and rewrite the code
to work in a 64-bit env.  on amd64 non-multilib systems, we mask it,
and provide a grub-static package instead.
-mike