Google Summer of Code/2014/Ideas/Embedded Gentoo using musl

This project involves integrating an alternative standard C library called musl into Gentoo, both for cross compiling and native compiling. Musl aims to be "lightweight, fast, simple, free, and strives to be correct in the sense of standards-conformance and safety." So far, stage4 tarballs have been built for amd64, i686 and armv7a-hardfloat-eabi. These were initially built using cross compiling toolchians which themselves were built using crossdev, but then were rebuilt on native hardware using home grown scripts , and not catalyst.

Picking up from here, the next steps in the project are:

1) To build cross compiling toolschains for mips32r2-o32, mipsel3-o32 and mips64r2-n32 architectures/abis. This will involve properly intergrating musl with crossdev which currently has some bugs.

2) To build stage 4 tarballs for the those architectures. This involves, among other things, patching various packages that don't conform to strict POSIX which musl assumes.

3) These stages need to be converted to stage3's, properly built using catalyst rather than using the ROOT=rootfs emerge -e @system technique which the homegrown scripts use.

4) If all goes well, the project can continue to porting over the hardened tool chain to those architectures.

Such a project would involve very eclectic skills: from hacking python in catalyst and bash in crossdev, to patching build systems and C code, to working with libc at a low (implementation) level.

Contacts


 * Anthony G. Basile [mailto:blueness@gentoo.org ]

Required Skills


 * C
 * Bash
 * Portage/Ebuild
 * Python
 * Assembly for various architectures
 * Git