AW: Re-port Intent for HPE NonStop (a.k.a. Tandem)

[Joachim Schmitz]

Hi Florian

No idea whether that port had ever been send back upstream, it must have
been done in 2007 or before.
Not sure what you mean by "stable kernel interface"?
No, sorry, unfortunately no gcc available nor possible to cross-compile, it
is actually the assembler part that is missing IIRC
While gcc may be free (libre) it is also provides quite a few non-standard
features. Our compilers do have some extensions too, but generally are
pretty strictly C89/90, C99 compliant.

Bye, Jojo

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Florian Weimer <fweimer@redhat.com> 
Gesendet: Montag, 14. März 2022 08:55
An: rsbecker@nexbridge.com
Cc: libc-help@sourceware.org; mike_kilpatrick@nskopensource.com; Shiva
Subramanian <shiva.subramanian@tcm.uk.com>; Bill Honaker <bhonaker@xid.com>;
jojo@schmitz-digital.de
Betreff: Re: Re-port Intent for HPE NonStop (a.k.a. Tandem)

> I have been asked by members of the HPE NonStop (formerly Tandem) 
> community to consider re-porting Glibc to the platform. There was a 
> port back around
> 2.12 but that never made it to x86.

It must have been a private port, not released to the general public.

Does HPE NonStop provide a stable kernel interface?  Linux is somewhat
unique in that.  Other systems require some level of synchronization between
libc and kernel updates.

> The current situation is that the platform is not on the list of known 
> ports. Glibc is a dependency of many projects that we want to bring to 
> the platform. How can this be pursued? My team is willing to 
> officially support the port once done. Although POSIX compliant, we 
> are limited to using a c99 compiler. gcc does not port, making this 
> interesting.

Can you use a GCC cross-compiler?

We need a publicly available, free (libre) toolchain for any port.  This is
both a matter of policy, and also to prevent the port from bit-rotting.

> Note: The link http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/development.html on 
> your wiki page https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/#Development gets a 404.

I've removed this section because it is outdated.  I'm not sure if we would
accept ports to new kernels at this point.  (New targets is a different
matter.)

Thanks,
Florian