[OpenWrt-Devel] [LEDE-DEV] 18.03/4 -> GCC 5 or 7

[Lucian Cristian]

On 04.03.2018 17:15, Hauke Mehrtens wrote:
> On 02/16/2018 01:46 PM, John Crispin wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> whats on the critical todo list for the upcoming release ? i still have
>> a few minor things that I'll be adding shortly, apart from that I am
>> currently not aware of any huge problems. the release will be a mix
>> between 4.9 and 4.14 afaik !?
> I think the kernel situation is ok now and not blocking a release, we
> will have a mixed kernel 4.9 and 4.14 release. All important targets are
> on one of these two kernel versions by now.
> The patches for the gemini target will probably get included soon.
> Some targets will probably be updated from 4.9 to 4.14, but this is not
> blocking.
>
>
> What do we want to do with GCC 5.5 versus 7.3?
> GCC 5.5 is getting old, we have multiple problems with it, the big
> blocker for GCC 7 was just fixed upstream and we backported that fix.
> see: http://git.openwrt.org/25aaff9100065dba881be71b9dcab1e9cc8a7b5f
> The x86 and x86_64 architectures are already on GCC 7.3, the ARC
> architecture uses their own GCC fork based on version 7.X all other
> architectures are on GCC 5.5.
>
> We have the following problems with GCC 5.5:
>   * U-Boot depends on GCC 6 or higher since version 2018.01 on ARM and ARM64
>    * GCC 5 and older are producing too big binaries, e.g. the SPL on the
> Allwinner A64 (sunxi, ARM64) is getting too big starting with U-Boot
> 2017.09 and does not fit into the SRAM any more, GCC 7 solves this problem.
>   * busybox on the gemini target updated to kernel 4.14 does not work
> correctly.
>   * GCC 5.5 only has out of tree fixes for Spectre, GCC 7.3 already has
> the retpoline fixes against Spectre included
>
> As the x86 target use GCC 7.3 now, there are multiple pull requests
> fixing some build problems in some packages with GCC 7.
> I am not aware of any regressions in GCC 7 compared to GCC 5.
> Changing the default compiler from GCC 5 to GCC 7 is no big problem, the
> problems are the regressions we are not aware of by now, if we change
> the default compiler for all architectures to GCC 7 we should probably
> wait 4 weeks before doing an RC release to be sure most of the runtime
> problems with GCC 7 are found.
>
> If we do the switch to GCC 7 I think we should also change binutils from
> 2.28 to 2.28.1 or 2.29.1. I found this problem with binutils 2.28 which
> was already fixed in 2.28.1:
> https://git.openwrt.org/bcd17ce9a3308accc30d99f4dd43f2062bb3fabc
> The minor versions contains more bugfixes.
>
>
> There is also a pull request for busybox 2.28.1 at github, this will
> probably also introduce some more regressions, so I am not sure if we
> should take it before or after the release.
> https://github.com/openwrt/openwrt/pull/733
> I do not have a real opinion on this and I am probably the wrong person
> to judge this.
>
>
> I do not know what the status of the software fast path patches are, but
> they are looking interesting.
>
>
> My proposal would be to update all targets to GCC 7.3 and also use
> binutils 2.29.1 and musl 1.1.19. This change would be done as soon as
> possible and then we branch of end of March or beginning of April for
> 18.X and do a RC1 one week after creating the branch.
>
> Hauke
>
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testing r6395-6c194078db on a ramips Ralink RT5350 with 4.14 and GCC 7.3 
gives this error in luci

daemon.err uhttpd[873]: /usr/bin/lua: /usr/lib/lua/luci/debug.lua:6: 
attempt to call a number value
daemon.err uhttpd[873]: stack traceback:
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        /usr/lib/lua/luci/debug.lua:6: in main chunk
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        [C]: in function 'require'
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        /usr/lib/lua/luci/util.lua:8: in main chunk
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        [C]: in function 'require'
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        /usr/lib/lua/luci/config.lua:4: in main chunk
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        [C]: in function 'require'
daemon.err uhttpd[873]: /usr/lib/lua/luci/cacheloader.lua:5: in main chunk
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        [C]: in function 'require'
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        /www/cgi-bin/luci:2: in main chunk
daemon.err uhttpd[873]:        [C]: ?


Regards
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