Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 9, 2022 17:33 UTC (Fri) by atnot (subscriber, #124910)
In reply to: Compiling Rust with GCC: an update by developer122
Parent article: Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Comparing the list between the linux and rustc docs:
- ARC (Synopsis embedded core mostly used for MCUs)
- Xtensa (although there is a third party fork)
- SuperH (only really notably used in SEGA game consoles)
- PA-RISC (out of support since 2013)
- OpenRISC (still finds itself on various embedded boards)
- Nios II (Altera/Intel hard core on FPGAs)
- Itanium (no comment)

I have to say, I'm a bit surprised by this, considering the amount of noise about GCCs greater architecture support. I expected some hard hitters, but none of these seem particularly relevant. Even m86k, which is mostly kept alive for recreational purposes, is already supported upstream. All of these are going to be primitive enough that I don't think the lack of rust support will be relevant for a long long while. Unless it becomes impossible to compile Linux without rust at all.

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 9, 2022 20:16 UTC (Fri) by developer122 (guest, #152928) [Link] (1 responses)

Looking at https://github.com/fishinabarrel/linux-kernel-module-rust... it seems that a lot of architectures not currently supported have in fact been removed from LLVM at one point or another. Perhaps as old architectures are dropped from linux the gap will close.

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 9, 2022 20:46 UTC (Fri) by atnot (subscriber, #124910) [Link]

That's what I think too. Of these ARC (maybe Xtensa) seem like the only one that is likely to be still considered for current designs. This will only accelerate as ARM and RISC-V continue to displace custom cores.

Assuming a very optimistic timeline of two years until widespread Rust adoption in the Kernel and another two years until the stale distros actually pick up those kernels, I think most of these will be long gone from the Linux tree by the time this is relevant. Or have LLVM backends. Cadence and Synopsys certainly don't lack the resources to make that happen if they want to.

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 10, 2022 0:15 UTC (Sat) by ndesaulniers (subscriber, #110768) [Link] (7 responses)

>> widely used

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 10, 2022 18:31 UTC (Sat) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link] (6 responses)

I mean there's still a financially self-sustaining scene of international indie game devs making entirely new games on the Dreamcast, big release day parties, kickstarters making ~25k to fund the titles, etc. SuperH is more widely uses than folks realize just not on desktops or servers, just by/for gamers. :)

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 11, 2022 4:39 UTC (Sun) by k8to (guest, #15413) [Link]

When i was at Wind River in the late 90s SuperH was an alive and well dev board type that people were actively developing on. I'm sure the arch made its way into various devices. I have no idea which if them are potentially still alive, of course, but I suspect it's not a trivial amount.

At the same time, it was dwarfed by powerpc, x86, mips, arm, and even sparc.

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 11, 2022 7:16 UTC (Sun) by joib (subscriber, #8541) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, the Dreamcast retro gaming scene doesn't run on Linux, does it, so not particularly relevant to the topic of which architectures Linux supports? Still kinda cool, I would have expected Dreamcast to be long gone and forgotten.

(Likewise the above-mentioned xtensa is ubiquitous in the 'maker scene' thanks to the ESP8266/ESP32 family of chips, but those don't run Linux so again not particularly relevant to this discussion. And as a side-note, it seems Expressif is transitioning to RISC-V cores.)

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 11, 2022 14:02 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (3 responses)

> Well, the Dreamcast retro gaming scene doesn't run on Linux,

No, but Linux does run on the Dreamcast hardware due to a community effort (with recent updates!): http://linuxdc.sourceforge.net/

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 18, 2022 15:45 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Game console homebrew is a weird place. I've noticed substantial *N64* support patches going into mainline during 5.x. Not sure what they were going for, but that's pretty cool.

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 23, 2022 11:10 UTC (Fri) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link] (1 responses)

> with recent updates!

The date in that page seems to be generated on every request. Following the links, updates are from 2012 or so.

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 23, 2022 11:35 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Ah…indeed. Oh well :( .

Compiling Rust with GCC: an update

Posted Sep 12, 2022 12:04 UTC (Mon) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]

You might also find surprising that gcc still doesn't support compiling for Apple M1 on MacOS. Gcc does support M1 on Linux, so this missing target triplet doesn't concern the kernel, but it's still an interesting counter point to the "Gcc supports more targets than LLVM" popular wisdom. aarch64-apple-darwin has orders of magnitude more users than all the Gcc-exclusive targets combined.