Gentoo Archives: gentoo-mips

From: "Stephen P. Becker" <geoman@g.o>
To: gentoo-mips@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-mips] profiles
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2005 15:19:34
Message-Id: 431478DB.6090404@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-mips] IP30 hang on warm boot by Olivier Bornet
1 Hi folks,
2
3 With the somewhat recent introduction of support for a wide variety of
4 SGI machines under gentoo, expanding to include all of Indy/Indigo2,
5 Origin, Octane, Indigo2 Impact (ip28), and O2, I've noticed more than
6 just a handful of new users have had problems when getting to the kernel
7 compile phase of the install. The problem is that on systems that only
8 run 64-bit kernels, you need a mips64-unknown-linux-gnu toolchain to
9 build the kernel. Since the userland is all 32-bit, the native
10 toolchain isn't good enough to compile the kernel. However, we do
11 provide a proper toolchain via the gcc-mips64 ebuild. Furthermore,
12 binutils supports mips64 by default, but symlinks must exist such that
13 we have mips64-unknown-linux-gnu-ld -> ld, etc. Both of these are
14 automatically provided during emerge system if you use the correct
15 profile, which is default-linux/mips/mips64/2005.0 currently.
16
17 The problem is that all of our stages ship with
18 default-linux/mips/2005.0 as the default profile, which does *not*
19 provide gcc-mips64 and the binutils symlinks. Therefore if a user
20 didn't know any better and didn't change their profile appropriately,
21 they would be stuck while trying to build their kernel because the
22 native 32-bit toolchain in the userland will just spit out errors and
23 die when compiling the kernel. Of course, this is easily fixed by
24 emerging gcc-mips64 and running "binutils-config --mips", which will set
25 up a proper toolchain. However, by that time, the user is discouraged a
26 bit and inevitably finds our irc channel and whines that Gentoo is broken.
27
28 Now, I have a few ideas for getting around this. Obviously whatever is
29 decided should be added to the documentation, but here are some ideas:
30
31 A) Do nothing...document in the handbook that if your machine is 64-bit,
32 you *must* select the mips64 sub-profile. (I don't like this because
33 some folks may be confused as to why everything still works just fine
34 with the mips profile, and/or they will just skim over that and keep going)
35
36 B) Similar to A, except ship stages without the profile set. That way,
37 folks really are stuck until they set the proper profile. (I don't like
38 this because they could still be confused and set the mips profile)
39
40 C) Make default-linux/mips/ provide all the 64-bit stuff and get rid of
41 the mips64 sub-profile, since all of the SGI machines we support can run
42 64-bit kernels if you so choose (ip22 is the only system that supports a
43 32-bit kernel at this time).
44
45 D) (Kumba's idea here...) Have machine specific profiles, e.g.
46 default-linux/mips/ip22, default-linux/mips/ip32, etc. (This could be
47 really useful because it would allow us to do some other machine
48 specific voodoo in the profile).
49
50 Any thoughts?
51
52 -Steve
53 --
54 gentoo-mips@g.o mailing list

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-mips] profiles Curtis Phillips <salmonleap@×××××.com>
Re: [gentoo-mips] profiles Stephen Bennett <spb@g.o>
Re: [gentoo-mips] profiles Kumba <kumba@g.o>