Table of Contents

FreeBSD stopped including modern versions of GCC and binutils in the base system; the project focused initially on bringing the excellent LLVM-based toolchain (especially, clang and lld), but there were also licensing motivations. However, being so recent, some platforms are not supported by LLVM and some users may wish to use a GNU toolchain even on platforms where there is support for LLVM. The purpose of this page is to document the steps required to facilitate the use of a modern GNU toolchain tracking both a “global” TODO list as well as a per-platform checklist of needed steps. One of the goals of this process is to deprecate and remove the old GCC 4.2.1 and binutils 2.17.50 in the base system.

Toolchain Packages

The external GNU toolchain consists of two packages: binutils and GCC. These packages are provided in two different ways.

External Toolchain

First a set of “external toolchain” packages are provided which can be used to cross-build (or natively build) a FreeBSD base system. These packages are built by the devel/binutils and devel/freebsd-gcc[69] ports. Each of these ports has a “flavor” for each supported architecture. These build packages named <arch>-binutils and <arch>-gcc[69]. The GCC package includes a suitable CROSS_TOOLCHAIN Makefile and depends on the appropriate binutils package. These packages install cross-build binaries under /usr/local and can be used like so: 

# pkg install amd64-gcc6
# cd /path/to/src
# make CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=amd64-gcc6 buildworld

Native Toolchain

The second set of packages are used to build a native toolchain for a given architecture that provides a system toolchain (e.g. /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/ld) via the base/binutils and base/gcc6 ports. These packages can either be built natively or as cross-built packages using CROSS_TOOLCHAIN and CROSS_SYSROOT. The steps to cross-build a native toolchain consist of:

For example: 

# pkg install mips-gcc6
# cd /usr/src
# make CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=mips-gcc6 TARGET_ARCH=mips buildworld
# mkdir /usr/mips/sysroot
# make CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=mips-gcc6 TARGET_ARCH=mips installworld DESTDIR=/usr/mips/sysroot
# pkg install math/gmp math/mpfr bison gmake gettext-tools
# mkdir /usr/mips/packages
# cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg
# make CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=mips-gcc6 CROSS_SYSROOT=/usr/mips/sysroot package
# cp work/pkg/* /usr/mips/packages
# cd ../../base/binutils
# make CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=mips-gcc6 CROSS_SYSROOT=/usr/mips/sysroot package
# cp work/pkg/* /usr/mips/packages
# cd ../../base/gcc6
# make CROSS_TOOLCHAIN=mips-gcc6 CROSS_SYSROOT=/usr/mips/sysroot package
# cp work/pkg/* /usr/mips/packages

This would result in /usr/mips/packages containing three packages: pkg, freebsd-binutils, and freebsd-gcc6. These can be used to seed an initial package repository (in case no packages are currently provided for this architecture) such that an installed target system can use 'pkg install freebsd-binutils' and 'pkg install freebsd-gcc6'.

(There is more information about which packages are currently being provided for which architecture.)

TODO List

This is a list of general MI todo items.

Name Status Owner Review Commits Comments
Enable .init_array/.fini_array Committed JohnBaldwin D16014 474469 Enable use of .init_array / .fini_array
Don't require CROSS_* for base/* Committed JohnBaldwin D19128 D19129 493400 493401 This would permit building packages in native package builds and on a target host directly without requiring a sysroot.
Add toolchain makefiles to base/binutils and base/gcc6 Committed JohnBaldwin 521870 356289
Add 'make sysroot' related targets In testing AlexRichardson This would build a subset of world closer to 'make toolchain'
Add packages for GCC 9.x Committed JohnBaldwin D22863 520398
Replace crtstuff.c Committed AndrewTurner 339738 340213 340841
Replace libssp Committed KyleEvans D22943 356356 356358 An implementation based on examining the symbols libssp and Linux Standards Base (LSB) 4.1 is straightforward. Also see FreeBSDLibcSecurityExtensions
Merge base/gcc and devel/powerc64-gcc Not started Probably not useful
Use flavors for devel/*-binutils and devel/*-gcc? Committed BaptisteDaroussin, JohnBaldwin 517642 517976
Rebase RISC-V toolchain packages on “standard” packages Waiting for GCC upgrade JohnBaldwin D16503 473489 Rebasing riscv64-gcc requires updating powerpc64-gcc to 7.2 or later
Teach poudriere about a world image requiring base/gcc Not started
Support releases built by external GCC (xtoolchain for cross-build or base/gcc if native) Not started
Remove ${OSREL} from binary names in devel/*-binutils and devel/*-gcc Not started This requires teaching GCC to pick a sensible “default” OS major version
Remove binaries from base/* packages with tuple names Not started JohnBaldwin 518973 This confuses ports that depend on devel/binutils.

Per-architecture Checklist

This table contains a set of steps required by each architecture to support an external GNU toolchain.

Legend

Optional
Required for future
Task aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips mips64 powerpc powerpc64 powerpcspe riscv64 sparc64
Task aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips mips64 powerpc powerpc64 powerpcspe riscv64 sparc64
devel/<arch>-xtoolchain-gcc port ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ D16351 ✔ ✔
devel/freebsd-gcc6 flavor ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
devel/freebsd-gcc9 flavor ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Boot a system built with xtoolchain ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Build with xtoolchain in CI ✔ gcc6 ✔ gcc6 ✔ gcc6 N/A
Use LLVM's libunwind (1) ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Build base/* in CI
base/binutils build and pkg-plist ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
base/gcc6 build and pkg-plist ✔ ✔ ✔ ✔
Self-hosted system build using base/* ✔ ✔
Boot self-hosted system build ✔ ✔
Run kyua tests on self-hosted system
kyua tests have same or less failures
Publish base/* packages
Use external GCC as default compiler N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A
Publish releases using external GCC N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A

(1) This is not required for external toolchain but is required for removing src/contrib/gcc.

See Also

ExternalToolchain