OSLib and ELF

[John Tytgat]

In message <gemini.jgdmk702wfd9201s4.druck at druck.org.uk>
          "David J. Ruck" <druck at druck.org.uk> wrote:

> John Tytgat <John.Tytgat at aaug.net> wrote:
> > For me it is simply a choice where I burn my developer time. A priority
> > choice.  No technical reasons.  Currently we have to different sets of
> > Makefiles, one for RISC OS native build and one for the cross-compile
> > build. 
> 
> No one is suggesting you have to do it all, as long as you don't make any
> changes to the actual sources which prevent it building with the native
> tools.

How can I avoid making changes to sources which prevent from building
the native tools without checking such builds on RISC OS ? It is almost
certain that a small error will happen which results in a broken native
build raising questions on quality afterwards.  My aim is to avoid this
unless we have a volunteer to help here.

> > Making ELF changes in the cross-compile build will not result in
> > ELF support for the native build. 
> 
> Obviously.
> 
> > And on top of that, we don't have yet GCCSDK 4 on RISC OS itself.
> 
> Yes we do. The loader issues means it isn't yet suitable for production
> code, but its more than sufficient to be able to tackle any transitional
> issues now.

What? You are mistaken or we have a huge misunderstanding here.  We don't
have GCCSDK 4, based on GCC 4.1, running on RISC OS yet.  And that's most
probably going to be an AIF binary instead of a static/shared ELF binary
avoiding any loader dependencies but that's not a firm decision yet.

> > It's time to have the ELF changes for OSLib officialised so that test ELF
> > builds can be done and QAed.  Like e.g. NetSurf.
> 
> So you already have a cross compiled ELF OSLib? It would have saved me a
> lot of work if you said when I asked about it a couple of months ago.

You probably missed John-Mark's answer in this mail thread the same day
you started it (3 Feb):

--8<--
[ELF version of OSLib]
[...]

Correct. There's 2 ways of doing this:

1) Pass the -elf switch to the assembler supplied with GCCSDK 3.4.6
2) Make defmod output GNU AS syntax assembler and build with the GNU AS
    supplied with (the as yet unreleased) GCCSDK 4.1.x

I produced a bunch of patches to do the latter some time ago, which John 
Tytgat has updated to apply against OSLib head. Perhaps he'd like to put 
them somewhere as my original patchset needs some work to apply now. I 
should point out that the Makefile changes in particular were extremely 
hacky. The GNU AS defmod backend was rather less so, however.
--8<--

Note BTW the comment on the Makefile changes...

For all clearness, it is this work I want to officialise so we can all
move forward.

John.
-- 
John Tytgat, in his comfy chair at home                                 BASS
John.Tytgat at aaug.net                             ARM powered, RISC OS driven