Re: [meta-arm] Removal of external-arm-toolchain?

On 23 Jan 2025, at 20:00, Denys Dmytriyenko <[email protected]> wrote:
> That said, it appears there are some other users of external toolchain - there 
> was a person from Smile recently fixing some issues with usrmerge support. And 
> I just received a personal email from one of our customers inquiring about it 
> as well. In other words - there are other interested parties out there...

At the time I asked Smile what their usecase was but I’ve forgotten already.  I’ll reach out again.

>> Also this is a prime use case for sstate, in particular the 
>> public yocto state server which can be used to fetch all the native tools, 
>> not just the compiler.
> 
> This is probably a topic for another thread, but there are some issues with 
> using sstate like that - public yocto sstate server is very slow and just 
> checking what is available takes a very long time, plus cross toolchain is not 
> a native package and from my experience re-use is quite low in other distros.

Try again if you haven’t recently: it has sped up a lot and I have a weekly cron job to verify that I can build packages using public sstate for the toolchain.

>> So, would anyone seriously object if I sent a patch to remove the 
>> external-arm-toolchain recipe? This would only be for master, we wouldn’t 
>> retroactively remove it from the stable branches.
> 
> As one of the meta-arm-toolchain co-maintainers[1], I would not object to 
> removing external-arm-toolchain support (the Linux side) from the layer.

Thank you for being explicit.  Copying in Sumit to get his feedback.

> But, besides external-arm-toolchain, there are also recipes in the layer for 
> baremetal compilers, which are not proper cross- recipes, but they pretend 
> to be native- ones. That's very hacky and there are some drawbacks, while the 
> only benefit is speed, as those are also binary pre-builds. I was previously 
> suggesting replacing them with a proper baremetal multiconfig usage, like I 
> did in meta-ti for K3 platforms. And as I recall, you were interested in that 
> solution as well. If that's still the case, please let me know if you need any 
> help with that…

That’s literally been an open jira that I filed internally about three days into starting at Arm… I’m still interested in that solution so really should have a look at what meta-ti is doing.

Cheers,
Ross