Re: [Xen-devel] tool stack tool chain dependencies (again)

[Doug Goldstein <cardoe@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/16/16 6:52 AM, Jan Beulich wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> especially some of the changes late in the 4.8 cycle have caused me
> to spend a good part of the morning trying to figure out how to build
> the tool stack on an older system. Among other things I've run into
> - ipxe all of the sudden not working with make 3.80 anymore (despite
>   apparent attempts to do so in their Makefile)
> - ipxe not working with gas prior to 2.18 anymore (requiring the
>   .reloc directive)
> - rombios causing ld to segfault when building with debug=y (later
>   findings suggest this may be because overriding CC in ./.config
>   works, but doing so for e.g. AS and LD doesn't affect namely
>   the tools/firmware/ subtrees)
> - -O0 causing fallout with an admittedly questionable sys/stat.h
> None of this was a problem with an early October build.
> 
> I think we really need two things here: One is that I think we should
> bump our minimal required tool chain component versions, or
> alternatively have tools/configure properly disable sub-components
> (taking into account overrides from ./.config) - I certainly could live
> with qemu-trad being disabled on such old systems, but otoh
> upstream qemu in the past has proven to not be much better, and
> it would be of questionable use if both got disabled. The other is
> that I think we should actually make sure things build with those
> versions.
> 
> Jan

I'm with you on wanting to see a solution for this. I want to get back
to my Travis CI or GitLab CI work to test build Xen in as many different
Docker environments as possible.

Some of this would be made better by not shipping code as part of Xen
and requiring the distro or the source builder to install the proper
dependencies from their distro. The reason you're having an issue with
iPXE is that it was bumped to a newer version to support GCC 6 and part
of the modernizing work of iPXE was to remove old hacks for toolchains
they no longer supported. I don't know of a single distro that ships the
Xen built iPXE (except for the CentOS packages but could and should be
fixed).

-- 
Doug Goldstein

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