Cross toolchain support for SPUs on Cell / ppc64

[Jochen Roth]

A lot of people using the PS3 and / or Cell based systems suffer from 
missing toolchain support for building SPU applications just after they 
installed Fedora. They have to download the necessary packages from 
various places and have to do the package management by their own.

I think that the time is right to support SPUs right out of the box 
after installing the latest Fedora release. Therefore we'd need to have 
the following packages in Fedora.

spu-binutils
spu-gcc
spu-newlib
spu-gdb

Before we start opening Review Requests in Bugzilla we want to start the 
discussion what the best approach for supporting cross compiling 
toolchains like the SPU toolchain in Fedora is. As far as I know there 
is only one example for cross compiler support in Fedora which is Atmels 
AVR.

Our suggestion would be to build spu-binutils from the same source as 
the system gcc for ppc is build. Here we'd have to change the ppc 
binutils package and add --enable-target=spu . A separate spu-binutils 
package including the spu assembly is needed anyhow.

It would also be good to be able to build the spu-gcc from the same 
sources as the system gcc is build. It would be even better if the 
spu-gcc is build from the same .spec file. Of course this needs a lot of 
configuration and adjustments.

For spu-newlib we'd have to create a separate package as we'd have for 
spu-gdb.

Thanks for any comment, suggestion and help.

-- 

Jochen