Re: AVR32 support in crosstool-ng

[Joel Sherrill <joel dot sherrill at oarcorp dot com>]

On 4/29/2013 2:49 PM, Martin Guy wrote:
> On 29 April 2013 20:29, Joel Sherrill <joel.sherrill@oarcorp.com> wrote:
> > Why doesn't Atmel submit their patches upstream?
> They would never be accepted as long as they make modifications to
> cpu-agnostic portions of GCC.
Yep.

But it speaks poorly of the port if they did that and didn't try
to find a way to address it. :)
> > As an embedded FOSS community, we need to be encouraging
> > vendors.. prodding them.. to submit their tools upstream.
> Absolutely. After all, chip vendors make their money by selling
> silicon, not compilers.
Agreed.
> But it's not only a technical issue. The GCC maintainers also need to
> believe that the port will continue to be maintained, tested, the code
> updated to new versions of GCC, that bugs found will be fixed and so
> on, i.e. a commitment from the vendor to help with to the ongoing work
> of software maintenance.
I understand completely. I am the GCC RTEMS maintainer.

OTOH I wonder why a chip vendor would be opposed to this. Wouldn't they
want an improving rather than dead end compiler?[1] And yes sometimes they
pay someone to do the port and not to update it. So they don't have
in-house expertise and there is no long plan to support it except maybe to
pay the consultant again per bug.

As a community, we just aren't doing a good job of selling the idea that
merging and maintaining benefits both sides. It has to be cheaper to keep
it up to date and tested versus jumping 4 or 5 major gcc versions. But it is
cheaper to do the port, throw it to users and walk away.

Sorry for the rant. I have managed to prod behind the scenes and get a
couple of ports merged into the FSF. One was easy. One has been taken
over two years and is just now getting merged.  I just get frustrated when
I see other targets out in the cold.

[1] Both the msp430 and avr32 are based on gcc versions which are in the
4.3/4.4 version range. Those are dead. 4.6 was just closed.
>     M


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Joel Sherrill, Ph.D.             Director of Research & Development
joel.sherrill@OARcorp.com        On-Line Applications Research
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