Re: Porting LLVM, clang et al. to GNU/Hurd

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hi!

On Thu, 10 Jan 2013 12:36:38 +0100, I wrote:
> At night, when having my GNU Hurd maintainer hat on, I'm currently
> working on porting LLVM, clang et al. to x86-class systems using the GNU
> Hurd as their kernel, <http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/>.

I have now posted most of my patches for review.  Finally.  ;-)

> In the following, I'll just use LLVM to refer to the whole suite of
> tools.
> 
> 
> To some extent, LLVM already works on GNU/Hurd; thanks for constructing
> it in a portable fashion.  From LLVM's perspective, the Hurd mostly is
> just another Unix-like system to be ported to, very similar to those
> using the Linux kernel; and a bunch of fixes are in the "know what to do"
> category, but for others I'd like to solicit your input first.
> 
> 
> At very few places only, LLVM (as most other software) needs to know
> which specific operating system kernel it is running on.  Most of the
> details that deal with interfaces specific to operating system kernels
> are abstracted in the system's C library.  So it happens that once a C
> library is available, most "Unix" software can be compiled without really
> caring about the system's kernel.  So, in summary, LLVM (as most other
> software) does not really care about the operating system kernel (Linux,
> Hurd), but rather cares about the operating system's user-space
> interface, POSIX/Unix, as defined by the C library.
> 
> Both Linux-based and Hurd-based systems typically use the GNU C library
> (glibc), which itself largely follows POSIX/Unix.  GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd
> systems also share the concept of how they're bundled: in distributions,
> such as Debian GNU/Linux, respectively Debian GNU/Hurd -- the latter one
> being the most prominent and advanced one offering support for the Hurd.
> (By the way, Debian also support a system using the FreeBSD kernel,
> Debian GNU/kFreeBSD.)


> After "finishing" (whatever that is) ;-) this port, I'll also continue to
> be available for maintaining it.


Grüße,
 Thomas

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