[gentoo-soc] Weekly Report: Portage Powered Android

[Gunwant Jain]

Hey Everyone !

I was about to give a coherent report for what I have been doing for 2
weeks next week, but my mentor suggested to explain my findings briefly.

I found out that AOSP has actually been phasing out of using GCC in
favour to Clang/LLVM based toolchains. And so, from the last time I 
gave in my weekly report, I have been checking up on llvm_android [1],
the source of the toolchain which AOSP uses to build itself.

I built the toolchain for x86 host using the original scripts AOSP
provides and found out that they in terms of Bionic (Android's libc),
they only copy Bionic's headers, compiles Clang for different targets
using a prebuilt toolchain bundled with the entire package. 

Later, when we build Android, the prebuilt toolchain compiles Bionic and
uses it as intermediatories to compile the other bulk of Android
(frameworks, etc.).

My main objective I think would be to introduce a aarch64 host config 
for llvm_android, and integrate the toolchain in the AOSP build process.
Take this with a grain of salt, as I believe I should put more research
into this first, which is why I was taking another week.

I would probably write a detailed blog documenting AOSP's build process
by the end of this working week, covering everything we need to proceed.


Regards,
Gunwant

[1] https://android.googlesource.com/toolchain/llvm_android/