Re: will this idea work?

["A. Wilcox" <awilfox@adelielinux.org>]

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On 01/25/18 20:07, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 01:31:38PM -0800, Po-yi Wang wrote:
>>
>>
>> On Thu, 25 Jan 2018, Rich Felker wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 12:09:27PM -0800, Po-yi Wang wrote:
>>>> i scanned through the musl mailing list archive, it seemed that
>>>> the minimum supported binutils version has been discussed before,
>>>> around October 15, 2015. what is the current recommended
>>>> gcc+binutils
>>>> version that can support 486,armv5,ppc750?
>>>
>>> In general, old versions of both binutils and gcc have lots of unfixed
>>> bugs, and it's hard to assess completely whether musl will be
>>> affected. Non-x86 platforms are much less tested in combination with
>>> outdated tools. I would highly recommend against running binutils
>>> versions much older than 2.20 or so, and ideally you should be using
>>> 2.25 or later.
>>>
>>> Is there a reason you really want to use old versions?
>> not at all, i do not mind using binutils-2.24 for example, except
>> old gcc (gcc-3.x) will probably not consent to work with it.
>> working with new tools require extensive testing.
> 
> I don't know any reason to expect old gcc to fail with new binutils.
> New versions of binutils have to accept old .o files (e.g. from old .a
> library archives) and asm hand-written for old versions of the
> assembler, etc. and all gcc does is feed asm to the assembler.
> 
>> it would be best to work with known tools, if no new requirement
>> asked for.
>> besides, new tools normally demand more resources--memory for example.
> 
> This is definitely true of gcc, but not nearly as much so for
> binutils.
> 
>> newer binutils, for example, require new patches to conserve memory...
>> it is not imperative, but if i have the time or will, i like to see
>> some old hardware can compile on its own, un-assisted by 16G equipped
>> x86-64, few simple tools. it used to be possible. so what has changed?
>> new tools might have new bugs.

Though I can't really comment on speed, I will say that for the
following hardware platforms:

* x86: Pentium III 733MHz, 1 GB RAM, 100 GB PATA disk

* PPC: G3 600MHz, "Snow" iBook, 640 MB RAM, 40 GB PATA disk

I was able to build an entire Gentoo stage3 using musl + gcc 5.3 +
binutils 2.27.  This was "Foxtoo", the project before Adélie.  There was
no x86_64 builder of any kind involved, except the initial cross.  They
did however both take a few days of building without being powered off.

I will, however, agree that GCC 7 seemed to me to be a hot mess.
Haven't evaluated 7.2, but 7.1 was completely unusable for us.

Best,
--arw


-- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
http://adelielinux.org


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