[Caml-list] [ANN] RISC-V native backend, no longer cross-compiling

[Caml-list] [ANN] RISC-V native backend, no longer cross-compiling

[Nicolas Ojeda Bar]

Dear all,

A little over a year ago, I announced [1] a preliminary release of a
native-code backend for the OCaml compiler targeting the emerging
RISC-V architecture [2].  Due to the state of the RISC-V development
tools at the time, this backend existed only in the form of a
native-code cross-compiler and had many limitations.

Since then, the RISC-V community has made considerable progress to the
point that it is now easy to run a full Linux environment (including
gcc + friends) natively on RISC-V [3, 4].

Today I am happy to announce a preliminary, native release of the full
OCaml system on RISC-V. It is available at

    https://www.github.com/nojb/riscv-ocaml.

It targets the 64-bit variant of the RISC-V architecture, RV64G (the
32-bit variant should also work, but has not been tested).  All
libraries are supported (Dynlink and Num have a couple of issues left,
but I expect them to be resolved shortly).

I plan to maintain and keep developing this port for the foreseeable
future, tracking official OCaml releases.  It is currently based on
the recently released 4.04.0.

If you would like to play around with it, a Docker image is available
with an installed 4.04 ready to go:

    docker run -it nojb/riscv-ocaml:4.04.0 /bin/bash

As usual, any and all comments are warmly welcome.

Thanks!

Best wishes,
Nicolas

[1] https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2015-06/msg00046.html
[2] https://riscv.org/
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/RISC-V
[4] https://hub.docker.com/r/sorear/fedora-riscv-wip/

Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] RISC-V native backend, no longer cross-compiling

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Nov 05, 2016 at 08:43:15AM +0100, Nicolas Ojeda Bar wrote:
> Today I am happy to announce a preliminary, native release of the full
> OCaml system on RISC-V. It is available at
> 
>     https://www.github.com/nojb/riscv-ocaml.
> 
> It targets the 64-bit variant of the RISC-V architecture, RV64G (the
> 32-bit variant should also work, but has not been tested).  All
> libraries are supported (Dynlink and Num have a couple of issues left,
> but I expect them to be resolved shortly).
> 
> I plan to maintain and keep developing this port for the foreseeable
> future, tracking official OCaml releases.  It is currently based on
> the recently released 4.04.0.

I have added your backend to the Fedora Rawhide OCaml 4.04.0 package.

It's not yet built in the publicly available Fedora/RISC-V packages,
since those are based on Fedora 25 [currently Rawhide is the future
Fedora 26].  However you can still look at the sources here:

  http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/ocaml.git/log/
  http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/ocaml-srpm-macros.git/log/

A couple of things which would help us (a little, although they are
not a big deal):

- Squash your patches down to a single commit ...

- ... but separate out the config.guess/config.sub change in
  a separate commit, since we would usually copy those in
  from our own copies.

Thanks for your great work on OCaml & RISC-V,

Rich.

Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] RISC-V native backend, no longer cross-compiling

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 07:08:49PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> It's not yet built in the publicly available Fedora/RISC-V packages,
> since those are based on Fedora 25 [currently Rawhide is the future
> Fedora 26].

Actually I changed my mind on this bit and I'm going to build the
OCaml packages into the RISC-V tree.  They'll be available in the next
day or two at https://fedorapeople.org/groups/risc-v/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones