EdgyPlusOneToolchainRoadmap

Revision 8 as of 2006-07-05 22:45:01

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Summary

This is a high-level overview of the work to be done for the toolchain in the release after Edgy.

We will:

Rationale

The toolchain needs to be ready as of the openning of the release. Because of this, toolchain changes are sketched out at the beginning of the release, finalised near feature freeze, and uploaded to the archive because merges, syncs and uploads start.

Scope

The next release of Ubuntu.

Implementation

  • Update to current upstream versions. As of this writing, we expect these to be:
    • glibc-2.4.x
    • binutils-2.17.x
    • gcc-4.2.x
      • tune with -mtune=generic by default
    • gcj-4.2.x, follow the development of the ecj branch for 1.5 language and runtime features
  • Enable long-double-128 support in glibc and gcc on powerpc and sparc.
  • Perform test rebuild of the edgy archive against these new toolchain releases.

Outstanding issues

  • In support of reducing the number of packages in main and for reducing build time and complexity for security updates, we want to split additional languages into separate packages. At this point, that causes support to be dropped from the main driver, and causes conflicts. We need to investigate if there is a way around this. If not, this issue can be dropped.
  • -mtune=generic is a new feature in gcc which produces better optimised code on Intel chips. We need to confirm that there are no regressions on 32-bit AMD chips before enabling this.
  • We are often asked for using --as-needed by default. We need to provide documentation on why this isn't enabled by default so that it can be made clear. It would also be useful to setup a "Janitors Team" that would go through and check for text relocations or an excessive number of visible symbols in common libraries and would work with upstreams to make tighter DSOs. This group could also expore using --as-needed and linker optimisation as well.

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