For the next BeleniX we are planning to pull some binary packages out of OpenIndiana and build some from source ourselves. The primary things we need at this point include the base Gcc 4.5 compiler toolchain and properly working RPM5 packaging. We subsequently need an importer to convert IPS binary packages into RPM5 since we want to pull some stuff from OpenIndiana (like Gnome).

I was playing around with RPM5 on OpenIndiana and now have a working setup, though not properly bootstrap packaged yet. The other major task was to get Gcc 4.5.2 built with all features enabled. It was quite a task given that C++ GMP stuff is involved and that the Gcc 4.3.2 compiler on OpenIndiana is heavily broken and buggy.

Details of how I got to a properly working Gcc 4.5.2 toolchain is here: http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/belenix-discuss/2011-January/001491.html

One interesting new feature in Gcc 4.5 is the support for Link Time Optimizations which begins to match what is being offered by the Interprocedural Optimizations feature in SUN Studio. The Gcc 4.3.2 piece in OI has at least these problems:

  1. It provides libssp.so which the compiler looks for libssp_nonshared.a. Libssp is used if compiler options to provide stack protection are enabled.
  2. It provides an improperly linked libstdc++ as a result of which C++ exception handling is broken with g++. The library search order in libstdc++ should first be libgcc_s.so followed by libc.so since there exists the same stack Unwind handler function in both with different parameters. The  libgcc_s version is what libstdc++ needs to use.
  3. It is not able to compile the Parma Polyhedra Library required by Gcc to support loop optimizations via advanced Polyhedral methods. Some C++ template handling seems to be broken.

In any case now that I have the Gcc 4.5.2 toolchain working properly I would be re-building RPM5 with that and creating a bootstrap framework next.

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