Mail Archives: pgcc/1999/03/14/17:27:05
On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, Marc Lehmann wrote:
> > imho, this is a clash of egos and does nothing to advance our collective
> > works.
>
> Your humble opinion is wrong. egcs always had an open ear to linus (and
> still has). it has nothing to do with ego on the side of egcs. the problem
> is that linus (having a very limited knowledge of compilers) thinks he
> knows how egcs has to work.
>
> If you'd follow linux-kernel you'd knew that he pissed off quite many of
> his co-workers as well.
I do follow it and my statement is in regards to your implications of how
broke the kernel is and etc.
Often I tend to agree with Linus after a little thought has been put to the
matter. He likes solutions that are well thought out and tested not once or
twice but three times. He in general refuses to fix things with a quick
hack that appears correct. Once it's been thought out and looked at a few
times it goes in. Generally there's been a few fixes to the fix.
Your previous emails gave the impression that you don't intend to listen to
Linus wrt the kernel and compiler related bugs.
On March 9th, you stated that the linux kernels, including 2.2.3 are broken.
I am still asking you what specifically is broken because I have compiled
and am using egcs/pgcc 2.2.3 kernels on several machines.
Your statement that Linus supports only 2.7.2 is slightly aside. He has
accepted patches to fix kernel source due to warnings and errors emitted by
the egcs/pgcc family. 2.7.2.3 is the lowest cc capable of decently
compiling the kernel. 2.7.2.3 is "supported" by Linus because it is the
lowest workable compiler.
And yes, using higher optimisations for the kernel does certainly improve
it's performance.
A short bit later in a discussion regarding c++ a gentleman said things are
broken and you said "AFAIK there are problems with both kde and
linux-kernel, NOT with egcs or pgcc" and I disagree. I picked up a binary
tgz of pgcc a bit back and after a few weeks of frustration found that it
[c++ includes] was compiled to look for everything under /usr/local instead
of /usr. Once I symlinked everything all was well.
I don't claim egcs is full of bugs, I expect mistakes, mistakes happen.
Saying "It's not my fault -- bug Linus!" doesn't get us very far. Saying
that filename.c will cause a spilled register, try patching like so... will
get us somewhere.
"The consensus is that Linus tries to read the documentation before
flaming and the egcs developers try to help the kernel by supporting more
interfaces in the future.
You make a very positive statement that many should follow. In general,
egcs/pgcc bring light to grey areas in the kernel that need touching and the
kernel excercises the bounds of the compiler. It is somwhat symbiotic in
nature.
Linus certainly isn't perfect and neither are the rest of us. Spreading
discordanant vibes in email just doesn't help really.
As to Linus' flaming publicly/privately, you're doing just that. It's not
getting us anywhere but riling our emotional side.
I griped for a good time about the messiness of the 2.1 kernel when I
switched to pgcc. People can get pretty busy and stress goes up.
Eventually many of the signed v.s. unsigned and etc warnings have been
corrected.
"the point is that I don't want to hear bug reports regarding the kernel,
as my (official) position is that the kernel is buggy. I tried to be
cooperative with Linus (and his problems), but thats over once and for
all.
Here's a bugger. Communications are stopping. This is a Bad Thing (tm).
Perhaps my opinion wasn't quite so wrong :P
"Inofficially, I want the kernel to work with pgcc, of course, but until the
current faq maintainer does hard work and sorts out all these issues in the
faq I'll tell all people "don't do that!".
hmm?
I asked you specifically what is broken in the kernel. Everyone is
unofficially the FAQ maintainer by providing correct input. Tell me what
you think is so terribly broken and let's get things fixed.
In an aside, IIRC, I have compiled -march=pentiumpro and run them on my
K6-II cpu machines. Quite possible that I'm wrong on this but regardless, I
really love these guys. They cost significantly less than a pentium and
perform similarly. If I want the tiny pinch more of performance out of the
FPU then I'll have to pay the big difference.
I'm sure that if you tried your own wares on your kernel, you'd probably
gain a different view on how broken the kernel is. I have use egcs/pgcc
built kernels on industrial sized production machines for two years now.
I don't have problems. I have uptime and I have performance.
If the kernel was so terribly broke, I wouldn't be seeing months of uptimes
on machines that dish out a lot of work every day.
Thankyou for fine products. I come to expect by default the highest of
standards from both my compiler and my kernel.
-d
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