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

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." [1] So far, stage4 tarballs have been built for amd64 [2], i686 [3] and armv7a-hardfloat-eabi [4]. These were initially built using cross compiling toolchians which themselves were built using crossdev [5], but then were rebuilt on native hardware using home grown scripts [6], and not catalyst [7]. Picking up from here, the next steps in the project are:

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 [8].
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 [9].
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.
If all goes well, the project can continue to porting over the hardened tool chain to those architectures Project:Hardened.

Contacts

Required Skills

C
Bash
Portage/Ebuild
Python
Assembly for various architectures
Git