ORConf 2024

September 14, 2024 2 minute watch

Lightning talk about automated toolchain building, testing and packaging at Embecosm.

Presented at ORConf 2024 in Göteborg, Sweden

Right, hi. For those that don't know me, I'm Simon.

When I'm not the person behind the camera doing filming at ORConf, I work at Embecosm.

You may have heard of us because we do compilers, mostly OpenRISC and RISC-V compilers,

and I spend a lot of time building a lot of compilers.

Our website, once a week, takes the top of tree of GCC and LLVM and builds RISC-V toolchains,

OpenRISC toolchains, and when I say a lot of toolchains, I mean there was a release of GCC and LLVM at the same time,

and let's just say the two machines under my desk were very unhappy with me.

The reason I'm mostly talking is because I just stick these toolchains out on the Internet,

and apparently people use them.

For instance, when the RP2350 was announced a couple of months ago,

I was like, hey, I wonder how the Boot ROM works?

And there's just a random reference to one of my compilers in there.

I should work on SEO, because if you actually Google that string,

Google says there are zero results except for this page, so clearly some work there.

But it got me thinking, if people are using these toolchains, are they any good?

Do people have any feedback?

So this is sort of an open call for anybody who's using RISC-V or OpenRISC, GCC or LLVM.

Tell me, what works? What sucks?

Do you wish you had binaries that ran natively on AArch64 or RISC-V?

We mostly use Newlib. Does PicoLibc of interest to people these days?

Does ZYX extension? Because that would be a standard one, not XYZ.

Does the compiler break? No, really, the compiler is definitely wrong.

Tell me why we've done something wrong.

Well, the community at large has done something wrong.

Or anything other interesting you're doing with the tools.

Basically, any feedback at all, because as I say, I throw these on the Internet,

and yeah, apparently people are using them.

So any feedback at all, throw them at this email, toolchains@embecosm.com.

I can't guarantee that I will respond to all of your emails,

but I can guarantee I'll read them.

So be nice.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]