On Fri, Mar 16, 2018 at 8:52 AM, Raghavan Santhanam <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello All, > > I wanted to know the feasibility of VirtualBox source to be built with > Clang/LLVM on Linux. As far as I researched, tried > and experimented so far, it turned out that there are many hard-coded > gcc/g++-specific Makefile variables, etc which I tried > to update beforehand via configure script. And also tried to work upon some > of the code that used non-standard VLAIS > that gcc supports as an extension but clang doesn't. With that, I was able > to some of the code with Clang/LLVM and still > there are some more to build that are likely to throw some more compilation > errors, etc due to gcc/clang extensions differences. > I also tried to reuse the MacOS/darwin settings(as an experiment) as it > seems to use Clang/LLVM as the compiler - but > appeared to require more effort than using Linux(OS) specific Makefile > settings to point to Clang/LLVM and get the build > going. So, before proceeding further, I wanted to know if there have been > attempts to build Virtualbox using Clang/LLVM > on Linux for Linux. I saw an old thread discussing about the same being > possible for FreeBSD. So, I tried to set the OS to > be FreeBSD and get going to see how far the build can go - it failed in the > first few steps when it didn't find some FreeBSD > specific settings which I had expected to happen as I am using Ubuntu 17.10 > x86_64 as the host to build Virtualbox using > Clang/LLVM. So, any thoughts on this? > > By the way, I was successful in building all of the Virtualbox kernel > modules(vboxpci, vboxnetadp, vboxnetfltm, vboxdrv), > using Clang/LLVM and they are completely working as expected as I verified > the same by running Ubuntu 17.10 x86_64 > as the guest within the installed Virtualbox(v5.2.8) on the same host Ubuntu > 17.10 x86_64 I am using for the above > Clang/LLVM/Virtualbox/Linux building process. Below are the metadata > embedded within these kernel modules showing > the compiler used to build them to be Clang/LLVM along with the other > details of host and VirtualBox guest to give a > better context in this regard. > > Cheers, > Raghavan Santhanam
Yeah, we are building (most parts) with clang on FreeBSD since around virtualbox 4.3.10 so almost 4 years now. The commit back then which might give you a good summary of the changes is here: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports?view=revision&revision=349473 Beware that also includes patches that are not clang relevant. -- Bernhard Fröhlich http://www.bluelife.at/ _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
