[LV] Success! was: Re: Status of the toolchain build scripts?

[Mikkel Lauritsen]

"Peter Lund" <firefly at vax64.dk> wrote:

>> So - I guess the current question is which areas (kernel, libc etc.) are
>> most in need of attention?
>
> How about:
> 1) an easy way to get a toolchain up and running
> 2) an easy way to get a kernel compiled
> 3) an easy way to get a userland of sorts compiled
>
> as your recent experience shows, there are some obstacles along the
> way ;)

You betcha. Having a reasonably bugfree toolchain build would be really
nice, and AFAICS that's a minor exercise - make sure that the referenced
version of mpfr exists, update documentation (including the website) etc.

Aside from that, In my case the major obstacle was that the upstream
versions had a number of serious problems, but I guess that there isn't too
much to be done about that...

> I can perhaps be of some assistance in the packaging of a precompiled
> version of such a toolchain in the form of a socalled "Autopackage", an
> executable file containing a self-extracting installer which should work
> satisfactorily on most recent Linux distributions and some older ones,
> making short thrift of an otherwise somewhat painful installation
> experience.

I think having a prepackaged toolchain would be a really good thing, as I'd
naively assume that anybody interested in linux on Vax would tend to focus
on the kernel itself instead of mucking around with GCC and its friends.

Would it make sense to take a recent toolchain build and bundle it up in an
autopackage or equivalent format, and then make it available from the
website?

With respect to the kernel things are in a reasonably good shape, I think.
A working default config is obviously a good thing to have, but other than
that building a kernel is no more difficult than on all other platforms.
Still, we could consider documenting which parts of the kernel are in
working order so new people for example would know that including the
iso9660 filesystem is a bad idea.

Userland I haven't got any comments on yet :-)

On a completely unrelated note, does anybody happen to know if there are
any kinks involved in MOP booting a VXT2000? It apparently obtains an
image from the MOP server without problems, but after that absolutely
nothing happens other than the chevron is displayed again. It reports a
number that I guess is the size of the downloaded file, but it doesn't
quite fit with the size of the actual file on the server; it's about 14K
too large.

Best regards,
  Mikkel
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