Speaking of OpenBSD:
Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures.
The support is now ready for testing, via a patch set presented by Kirill A. Korinsky in a message to the
↫ Peter N. M. Hansteentech@mailing list, with the subject LLVM toolchain for sparc64.
On a related note, the the entire LLVM stack (version 19.1.7, including llvm’s binutils, clang, ldd) has also been ported to the SPARC version of Solaris 11 Express (snv_151a). This should make it possible to also port things like Rust and Zig to this same version of Solaris on SPARC, which is good news, because this release supports SPARC hardware long dropped by the current Solaris builds from Oracle.
Good to see this. It has always seemed strange to me that BSD would rely on GCC as the system compiler. FreeBSD has defaulted to Clang/LLVM for ages.
Great news on SPARC as well, although that is an older version of LLVM. I hope they keep it up-to-date. Thom mentions version 19.1.7 but the LLVM toolchain link in the snippet talks about LLVM 22.
Click the link. There’s two different news items here. One for OpenBSD, for for Solaris.
One issue that both OpenBSD and NetBSD has is that Clang/LLVM doesn’t support all the architectures those BSDs support, which means you need two compiler toolchains as part of the base system
Most of OpenBSD’s supported platforms are LLVM/Clang by default, and indeed switched many years ago. LLVM/Clang has also been available experimentally on sparc64 alongside gcc since 2018.
./bsd.own.mk:GCC4_ARCH=alpha hppa m88k sh sparc64
./bsd.own.mk:CLANG_ARCH=aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips64 powerpc powerpc64 riscv64 sparc64
For those keeping track, that’s more than FreeBSD supports.
OpenBSD 8.0 later this year will have clang22 in base, 7.9 has clang19.
You’re also conflating two unconnected news items, although Thom’s at least partly at fault for that.
“strange it uses gcc part”, simple: give me a link to a compiler that supports all of openbsd’s arches and has an acceptable license.
it’s hypotised that gcc is a major part of why gnu became popular in the first place.
more technical: gcc has/had a not that clean boundsry of it’s front & backends, which did not make it very easy for new devs to get in the project (read the propoilce retrospect?) llvm otoh is a much cleaner design, making the frontends translade code to intermediate language ;, and the backend can produce isa spêcific binaries for that. this makes adding arches less risky for the whole project.
so adding an architecture hm, well, if it’s well defined and you do a basic version it might – might – seem doable. but processors evolve and you’ll need to add codepaths for new opcodes and when to use them (i386 example from the early days: mmx, amd 3dnow, mmx2 , sse , crc , md5, …)
and thats not even going into endianness, stack growth direction, etc….
I mean, this is not really a hypothesis; it is a matter of fact at this point.
GCC is now a world-class optimizing compiler, paired with Linux and the rest of the GNU userland, it provided conclusive proof that free software could produce serious, production grade systems. It effectively ended any credible argument that free software was inherently amateurish or incapable of competing with commercial development.
so that’s what loongson got traded for 🙂