> After a long long hayatus, I'm back.
Hey, welcome back ;-)
> I can cross compile a kernal without dorking with
> anything out side of /home/duane (my default user account)
>
> There are defininatly problems with the alpha linux
> makefiles that *DO*NOT* let you cross compile.
> It is basically broken. I'm going to have to look at
> various newer versions of the kernel to see if these
> things are fixed or not.
Don't worry about letting us know some details. Although at least *i* use various Alphas
as build-hosts, this is interesting enough. I only have two PC's - one of which is in use
as an Xterminal and Mailserver - but I could very well set up one of those to get
involved with the cross-development stuff.
> If/when I develop patches - who do I send them to?
> Is there a designated "alpha-kernel" person, or do I send
> them directly into Linus/Alan?
I would probably send them to Andrea Arcangeli at SuSE. He's doing *a lot* of work
on Alphas and thus has a deep understanding of what's going on in linux-alpha.
I've not been in contact with him, so I can't predict, whether he would like to see them
or not. But since he actively maintains patches to the main kernel-tree, he *might*
be interested. I would not send the patches to Alan or Linus, since their Email is
apparently cluttered with stuff of lesser importance already.
As always, YMMV.
> Found some problems with 'glibc' - sent the 4 line patch in already.
>
> I'm now at the stage where I have "vmlinux" and I
> need to do the "make bootpfile" step.
>
> The file 'objstrip' is now the problem it appears
> that it is written non-portable (ie: will not work
> in a cross compile situation)
>
> I'm getting this message:
>
> tools/objstrip -v /home/duane/ALPHA/dir-kernel/linux/vmlinux vmlinux.nh
> tools/objstrip: 0 program headers (forgot to link with -N?)
> tools/objstrip: extracting 0x00000000310000-0000000000000000 (at 310000)
> tools/objstrip: copying 4291756032 byte from
> /home/duane/ALPHA/dir-kernel/linux/vmlinux
> read: Invalid argument
>
> Two things look wrong (A) The extract range is dumb looking
> (B) 4291756032 is very *WRONG* looking for a file size.
>
> To fix this, I need some information.
> I hope you guys can help. If not please point me to who can.
>
> Remember my host is i686, target: alpha.
>
> intel alpha
> ie: sizeof(char) = 1 byte, alpha? Assume 1 byte?
> sizeof(short) = 2 byte, alpha? Unknown
> sizeof(long) = 4 byte, alpha? Unknown
> sizeof(long long) = 8 byte, alpha? Unknown
On Alpha, all sizes are the same as in x86, except for longs being 64bit by default. The
same of course goes for pointers.
By looking at the source of objstrip, i think, this is precisely your problem.
> Is alpha big/little endian?
little endian
> does alpha require/support/care about structure alignment?
> what about structure packing?
It cares *a lot* about alignment. It supports misaligned accesses, but traps on them as
all major RISC arches do. See do_enTuna in the kernel sources. You'll get a
kernel message about that. When creating the bootpfile, you should use the correct
alignment for 64bit machines, which is 8 bytes. I think, that at least the ELF headers,
which objstrip reads for tthe conversion is aligned to 8 bytes.
You *must* use that alignment, so make sure, that the cross-compiler uses it.
Also, objstrip uses longs in a way, that they are expected to be 64bits. IMHO, you
need hack either the cross-dev setup or the source itself, to make sure it uses
64bit longs, pointers and filedescriptors.
> Anybody have reasonable looking numbers for these things?
> I'm only looking for "ball park" numbers - I know mine will
> be different to some degree.
HTH,
T. Weyergraf
P.S.: I might be wrong on some of this - it's early here ( just got up ;-)
So, YMMV
-- Thomas Weyergraf kirk@colinet.de My Favorite IA64 Opcode-guess ( see arch/ia64/lib/memset.S ) "br.ret.spnt.few" - got back from getting beer, did not spend a lot._______________________________________________ Axp-hardware mailing list Axp-hardware@lists.alphalinux.org http://lists.alphalinux.org/mailman/listinfo/axp-hardware
This archive was generated by hypermail version 2a22 on Fri Jun 1 04:36:13 2001 PDT
Send any problems or questions about this archive to webmaster@alphalinux.org.