[Barrelfish-users] Newlib libc ported

[Zeus Gómez Marmolejo]

Dear Barrelfish developers,

I would like to keep updated with our progress here at BSC. We have
successfully ported the Redhat Newlib to Barrelfish as a libc replacement.
To do so, some code in the posixcompat has been rewritten to not call in
turn to the libc. This way, calls to write(), read() or sbrk() have been
lightly modified to implement the functionality present in the existing
libc. The objective has been to not touch the newlib.

Right now, all programs link with newlib, being able to boot all system
with this library. Also, in case the old library is needed, I've added a
variable in the Config for Hake to be able to select which libc library to
compile. Both of them are working. To do so, I had to separate includes
that were system dependent and others that were libc dependent.

This newlib has been included in the Barrelfish tree but can be used also
with the independent gcc cross-compiler that we also developed here. This
gives full C++ support with the GNU libstdc++ and exception support.

Some technical details that I had to cope... Now all libraries (vfs,
posixcompat, newlib, lwip, nfs...) are always linked in. Because newlib
always needs posixcompat as it has the "system calls" implementation. Due
to this, vfs, nfs and lwip have to be linked too as the implementation of
read() write() have calls to vfs and nfs. In some executables, vfs is not
needed but its linked in anyway. There was an issue with this, as
vfs_init() was always called as it's present in the init section of the
ELF. Some early executables in the boot process fail in the vfs_init() call
as the ramfs is still not available. To solve this, we have placed the
vfs_init() call at the start of the programs that use vfs, as most of them
don't use it.

If you wish I can send you the patch to be included in the tree...


Kind regards,


-- 
Zeus Gómez Marmolejo
Barcelona Supercomputing Center
PhD student
http://www.bsc.es
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