Re: Re: [lowrisc-dev] musl risc-v port & gsoc - resources & ideas

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Sun, Mar 06, 2016 at 06:31:30PM +0000, Hesham Almatary wrote:
> Hi Rich,
> 
> Thanks for this detailed e-mail. It's worth mentioning that during my
> last GSoC project that ported seL4 to RISC-V, I had to add RISC-V
> support to the muslc library [1] (only 32-bit, imitating the or1k
> port). It was mainly useful for userspace tasks, and works pretty
> well.
> 
> I thought this might be a good starting point for anyone who might
> work on this project. We can work to get this local code upstream if
> that makes sense.
> 
> [1] https://github.com/heshamelmatary/musllibc

Thanks for letting us know. Another student who's interested in the
project also just contacted me and has a partially-finished port that
was done independently. So I think a viable GSoC proposal for this is
going to need to go well beyond the initial porting work and aim to
get riscv support to first-class status. That probably means putting a
strong focus on testing, finding performance bottlenecks (which
doesn't necessarily mean writing asm to fix them; rather it might be
identifying and reporting compiler bugs that are causing the compiler
to generate bad code for the C), etc.

Now would be a good time for students interested in the project to
jump in with ideas.

Rich