Re: New external GCC toolchain ports/packages

On Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 1:49 PM John Baldwin <jhb_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> In the interest of supporting newer versions of GCC for a base system
> toolchain, I've renamed the external GCC packages from <arch>-gcc
> to <arch>-gcc6.  These are built as flavors of a new devel/freebsd-gcc6
> port.  The xtoolchain package is not used for these new packages, instead
> one does 'pkg install mips-gcc6' to get the GCC 6.x MIPS compiler and
> uses 'CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=mips-gcc6'.  I've also gone ahead and updated this
> compiler to 6.5.0.
>
> I will leave the old ports/packages around for now to permit an easy
> transition, but going forward, the <arch>-gcc6 packages should be preferred
> to <arch>-xtoolchain-gcc for all but riscv (riscv64-gcc and riscv64-xtoolchain-gcc
> are separate from the powerpc64-gcc set of packages).
>
> In addition, I've also just added a devel/freebsd-gcc9 package which
> builds <arch>-gcc9 packages.  It adds powerpc and riscv flavors relative
> to freebsd-gcc6 and uses GCC 9.2.0.  To date in my testing I've yet to
> be able to finish a buildworld on any of the platforms I've tried
> (amd64, mips, sparc64), but the packages should permit other developers
> to get the tree building with GCC 9.  To use these packages one would do
> something like:
>
> # pkg install amd64-gcc9
> # make buildworld CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=amd64-gcc9
>
> You can install both the gcc6 and gcc9 versions of a package at the same
> time, e.g. amd64-gcc6 and amd64-gcc9.  Having different packages for major
> versions is similar to llvm and will also let us keep a known-good
> toolchain package for older releases while using newer major versions on
> newer FreeBSD releases (e.g gcc9 for 13.0 and gcc6 for 12.x).
>
> I do plan to switch the default toolchains for make universe/tinderbox
> for targets using <arch>-xtoolchain-gcc based on GCC 6 over to the
> freebsd-gcc6 variants in the next week or so.
>
> --
> John Baldwin

Awesome, thanks!  I was able to get amd64 buildworld and buildkernel to
succeed with just a few changes, and none to the port.  I'll work on
getting the changes in.