Re: Hi and a few questions

[Isaac Dunham <idunham@lavabit.com>]

On Sun, 20 May 2012 13:21:16 -0400
Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> wrote:

> On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 12:03:20PM -0500, Richard Pennington wrote:
> > I want to target several processors, including i386, x86_64, arm,
> > mips, microblaze, ppc, and ppc64 so it looks like musl support will
> > have to be added for the currently unsupported processors.
> 
> Yes, and I'd be very happy to get support added. The reason for lack
> of ports is not lack of portability but lack of knowledge about these
> targets. I read up on ARM and did the ARM port using qemu / Aboriginal
> Linux boot images just because I found it a bit shameful to only
> support x86[_64], but I haven't gotten around to doing this with any
> others.

There was someone who was asking about portability previously; he has a
project that will use arm and mips cpus (this is the project that needs
libuv, hence the discussion on IRC) and-if musl works with libuv-he
thinks he could convince his boss to fund a port, if one isn't ready
ahead of time.

Microblaze is one of the oddball CPUs that you can configure without an
MMU. Would this project target MMU configurations only?

> > Now for my questions:
> > 	1. Can musl be built out of the source tree? I'd like to be
> > able to build for different processors in different directories.
> 
> At present, no. Even if the trivial changes were made to put the .o
> files somewhere else, there's also the issue of the include/bits
> symlink (which could actually be removed since arch/$(ARCH) is also in
> the -I path, but doing so would complicate the install rules and
> preclude using musl "in-place" without "make install" which is
> presently possible and a useful setup.
> 
> I'd welcome ideas (though I'd have to weigh whether to adopt them) for
> making this possible, but the source is small enough that I wonder if
> it's really necessary..

For what it's worth, a shadow tree (see lndir(1)) would probably do all
that's really needed, if you 
1 Get musl source code
2 lndir $MUSL_SOURCE ${MUSL_SOURCE}-${ARCH}
3 Configure and build in ${MUSL_SOURCE}-${ARCH}

You might have issues with shadowing after you have built musl (ie, do
3 in-tree, 2, repeat 3 in shadow tree), I wouldn't know for sure.

Isaac Dunham