Re: Interest in "Porting musl libc to RISC-V" project for GSoC 2016

[Masanori Ogino <masanori.ogino@gmail.com>]

Hello,

2016-03-04 7:06 GMT+09:00 Szabolcs Nagy <nsz@port70.net>:
> last time iirc musl port was considered to be
> not large enough in itself for a gsoc project
> (i think it should not take more than 2 months
> but i don't know the current state of risc-v
> qemu/linux/gcc/etc)
>
> you might need to think additional things to work on.
>
> for musl, one idea is to invest extra time on testing.
>
> for risc-v i think polishing the toolchain and the docs
> would be useful.

Agreed.

> there are some basic problems with the risc-v software
> eco-system:
>
> there is no proper sysv psabi spec. (designing one would
> have been better than copying obsolete nonsense from mips
> as i can see in the glibc port.)

Hmm, ABI is an important factor for the proposal, but I probably won't
have enough time to invent a new ABI and implement it during this
summer...
Anyway, would you give me any well-designed psABI (or non-SysV-psABI) examples?

> nothing is upstream yet (gcc/linux/.. ports are
> maintained out of tree, working with the upstream
> community is important for many reasons).

Agreed with the importance of merging to upstream.

> risc-v mailing lists are not public, only subscribers
> can see or participate in the discussions. (this is
> bad given that there are no specs, no upstreamed code
> so no source of information for outsiders.)

I think it would be great if archives are public. I don't know the
reason why the project decide to do so.

> for a musl port this means that we don't have abi
> stability guarantees, the port can stop working with
> the rest of the risc-v software stack.   so for a
> successful port i think some scripts should be developed
> to build and test the latest risc-v things against musl
> (cross-toolchain, rootfs, etc) so we can keep it working.

Indeed it's great to have an automated testing infrastructure. I really love CI.

Thank you for your suggestion!

-- 
Masanori Ogino