OpenBSD Journal

g2k16 Hackathon Report: Patrick Wildt on arm, LLVM and other progress

Contributed by pitrh on from the we'll arm that surströmming dept.

The g2k16 hackathon must have been a really great one, because here is yet another report, this time from Patrick Wildt, who writes:

I knew that if I had any plans for the hackathon, they would have been thrown out of the window as soon as I arrived there. That was a good plan actually, since exactly that happened.
Hackathons, especially the general ones, are perfect for discussing bigger projects and then just doing it. Shortly after I arrived I was talking to Theo at the pub and one of the topics to come up was LLVM and the new C++ stack, which would be helpful for newer architectures, especially ARM. The quintessence was basically to just do it.

What we did then was huge. First of all we switched armv7 from OABI to EABI. This EABI is basically what everyone does and what all ports expect from us. I prepared a diff and snapshots beforehand and we just put it in during the hackathon. Zaurus did not survive this ABI break and thus we got rid of it. This means we can concentrate on ARMv7 and make use of its helpful features, like using the hardware floating point unit. jsg@ quickly moved armv7 to PIE and static-PIE. C++ exceptions also will get a lot better.

The next item on the list was getting LLVM and the new C++ stack into the tree. With coordinated efforts I imported libc++, libc++abi and libunwind while pascal@ took care of the LLVM import. We all got it in before the hackathon ended. Now we can go on and make it run. Good times are ahead of us. But there's also a lot of work to do.

Thanks for the report, Patrick!

(Comments are closed)

Comments

  1. By Anonymous Coward (217.244.5.186) on

    Hurray for LLVM!

    Also, I'm loving this series of hackathon reports. Thankyouverymuch!

  2. By Predrag Punosevac (24.154.54.187) on

    I hate to be party pooper but C++ issues aside (LLVM is written in C++) LLVM is changing the license to Apache 2

    http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-September/104778.html

    which IIRC is incompatible with OpenBSD policy

    https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html

    Comments

    1. By Anonymous Coward (149.56.229.16) on

      > I hate to be party pooper but C++ issues aside (LLVM is written in C++) LLVM is changing the license to Apache 2
      >
      > http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2016-September/104778.html
      >
      > which IIRC is incompatible with OpenBSD policy
      >
      > https://www.openbsd.org/policy.html
      >
      >

      Still better than GPL. Also the license will only apply to "future" code, once code is out in the wild as BSD licensed code, and once people have incorporated it into their own code, you can't (as a developer) turn around and suddenly claim "sorry, your code is illegal, lol."

      This is probably why LLVM is in the "gnu" folder in the tree. This switch-to-Apache discussion has been going on since last year.

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