Re: linux-next: manual merge of the audit tree with the powerpc tree

From: Christophe Leroy <christophe.leroy@csgroup.eu>
To: Paul Moore <paul@paul-moore.com>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>,
	Stephen Rothwell <sfr@canb.auug.org.au>,
	PowerPC <linuxppc-dev@lists.ozlabs.org>,
	Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	Linux Next Mailing List <linux-next@vger.kernel.org>,
	Richard Guy Briggs <rgb@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: linux-next: manual merge of the audit tree with the powerpc tree
Date: Tue, 14 Dec 2021 19:32:42 +0000	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <1a78709f-162e-0d78-0550-4e9ef213f9c6@csgroup.eu> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAHC9VhQPizVLkr2+sqRCS0gS4+ZSw-AMkJM5V64-ku8AQe+QQg@mail.gmail.com>

Le 14/12/2021 à 19:23, Paul Moore a écrit :
> On Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 12:59 PM Christophe Leroy
> <christophe.leroy@csgroup.eu> wrote:
>> Hello Paul,
>>
>> I've been trying to setup your test suite on my powerpc board but it's
>> based on Perl and on a lot of optional Perl packages. I was able to add
>> them one by one until some of them require some .so libraries
>> (Pathtools-Cwd), and it seems nothing is made to allow cross building
>> those libraries.
>>
>> Do you have another test suite based on C and not perl ?
>>
>> If not, what can I do, do you know how I can cross compile those Perl
>> packages for PPC32 ?
> 
> Is there no Linux distribution that supports PPC32?  I would think
> that would be the easiest path forward, but you're the PPC32 expert -
> not me - so I'll assume you already tried that or it didn't work for
> other reasons.

There hasn't been Linux distribution supporting PPC32 for a few years 
now. And regardless, the boards I'm running Linux on are home made 
embedded boards, with limited amount of memory and flashdisk space and 
no video chip, so they are hardly supported by any distributions, even 
older ones.

> 
> I'm also not a Perl expert, but it looks like PathTools is part of the
> core Perl5 release, have you tried that?
> 
> https://github.com/Perl/perl5/tree/blead/dist/PathTools

I got it from https://metacpan.org/pod/Cwd
I guess it is the same ?

> 
> Finally, no, our only really maintained test suite is the Perl based
> one; there have been other efforts over the years but they were never
> properly supported and fell out of use (and applicability).  At some
> point you/someone was able to run the test suite, why isn't that
> working now?  Or was it a different powerpc ABI?
> 

Yes, Michael did on some PPC64 server, for this kind of HW there are 
distribution and they are able to run native compilers on it as well, so 
that's another story.

Christophe