[meta-xilinx] Dropping 'external-xilinx-toolchain' support from meta-xilinx

[Peter Crosthwaite]

On Thu, Dec 3, 2015 at 4:38 PM, Manjukumar Harthikote Matha
<manjukumar.harthikote-matha at xilinx.com> wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
>
> On 12/03/2015 01:21 AM, Nathan Rossi wrote:
>>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> So I hinted to this in a previous email. I am looking to drop the
>> 'external-xilinx-toolchain' recipe from meta-xilinx. However I would
>> like to know if this is a key feature people rely on (for Zynq or
>> MicroBlaze specifically).
>>
> For all SOC's (Zynq, UltraScale+ MPSoC, microblaze)
>
>> I just want to mention that their is a better solution to external
>> toolchain recipes for the Zynq toolchain. The meta-sourcery layer
>> provides support for CodeSourcery toolchains to be used within
>> Yocto/OE, this works great for the Xilinx 'arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi'
>> (which is a CodeSourcery toolchain if you were not aware) and even
>> provides the ability to use just gcc and rebuild glibc. All that is
>> needed to use it is to put the layer in bblayers.conf and add the
>> following lines into local.conf:
>>
>> TCMODE = "external-sourcery"
>> EXTERNAL_TOOLCHAIN = "<path to toolchain>"
>> EXTERNAL_TARGET_SYSTEMS[arm] = "arm-xilinx-linux-gnueabi"
>>
>> Now onto why I would like to drop this recipe. Apart from the above
>> case of a better alternative recipe implementation:
>>
>> * Maintaining the recipe to work for a set of several different types
>> of toolchain as well as several versions is becoming problematic.
>> * Xilinx only provides 32-bit Host binaries for Zynq, meta-sourcery
>> handles this quite well (will force building some native libs with
>> 32bit support). The current recipe in meta-xilinx just assumes you
>> have all the host dependencies in place for things to work.
>> * The toolchains have limits and incompatibles with OE, Xilinx does
>> not ship libiberty for example.
>> * No support for gcc on target (for any architectures).
>> * Also getting the toolchains is an effort (and for some people
>> impossible), requiring to download and install the Xilinx tools (and
>> agreeing to EULAs), this also makes it harder for users to audit and
>> meet license compliance.
>>
> We need to support Xilinx toolchain for various SOC's. Due to inconsistency
> in Xilinx toolchain

What are the inconsistencies?

Regards,
Peter

> we cannot just use meta-sourcery or meta-linaro or any
> others. We would want to continue using the external toolchain recipe and we
> are going to send out a series of patches to update this recipe (including
> support for aarch64).
>
> Thanks
> Manju
>
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