Hello, I am currently trying to build a ppc64 aware gcc 3.4 package, as mentioned in Matthias post :
http://lists.debian.org/debian-gcc/2004/debian-gcc-200403/msg00021.html First, i found that this gcc-3.4 package in experimental wasn't yet built on powerpc, which i did. It did output lot of FAILs in the tests later on, but i am not sure this is worrying or not. It builds simple binaries without problems. But it didn't build the biarch toolchain, so it was of no use for me. After a bit of investigation, i found out that : --target=powerpc64-linux --with-cpu=default32 Where needed for gcc-3.4 to build the biarch toolchain, and default to 32bit binaries, unless the -m64 option is given to gcc-3.4. I looked a bit at the source code, and found out that other 64bit arches did : # sparc64 build -------------------- ifeq ($(DEB_TARGET_ARCH),sparc) biarch := yes with_lib64gcc := yes with_lib64cxx := yes endif So i guess a good solution would be to do something similar for powerpc, not sure if this would include the --with-cpu=default32 though. I don't really know what the plans are for ppc64 support, but i hear that biarch userland is a post sarge issue. Also, i understood that we will not switch over to gcc 3.4 for sarge, which is the reason why it is in experimental currently. Or maybe it would be possible to have gcc 3.4 in unstable and later sarge, without it necessarily being the default ? What i am trying to do, and what would be nice, would be to have at least ppc64 kernels for the sarge release, since some boxes may need this and will have trouble with 32bit kernels. Don't know if this is realistic, but it seems to me that only gcc support is needed in order to achieve that. I hear that a 64bit procps and module-init-tools will be needed too, and probably a libncurses, which may be a problem, but let's worry about this later. Anyway, my question here is if you would consider it reasonable to enable the powerpc biarch toolchain, and have it default to 32bit for gcc 3.4 ? This should cause no problem for ordinary powerpc, but would allow to build ppc64 stuff with the same toolchain. Am i correct with this assumption ? I will try tomorrow to build this, but would it make sense to enable this in the experimental powerpc packages ? And what about the not gcc or cxx compilers ? Friendly, Sven Luther