The nvptx port [11/11] More tools.

[Jeff Law]

On 10/20/14 08:48, Bernd Schmidt wrote:
> This is a "bonus" optional patch which adds ar, ranlib, as and ld to the
> ptx port. This is not proper binutils; ar and ranlib are just linked to
> the host versions, and the other two tools have the following functions:
>
> * nvptx-as is required to convert the compiler output to actual valid
>    ptx assembly, primarily by reordering declarations and definitions.
>    Believe me when I say that I've tried to make that work in the
>    compiler itself and it's pretty much impossible without some really
>    invasive changes.
> * nvptx-ld is just a pseudo linker that works by concatenating ptx
>    input files and separating them with nul characters. Actual linking
>    is something that happens later, when calling CUDA library functions,
>    but existing build system make it useful to have something called
>    "ld" which is able to bundle everything that's needed into a single
>    file, and this seemed to be the simplest way of achieving this.
>
> There's a toplevel configure.ac change necessary to make ar/ranlib
> useable by the libgcc build. Having some tools built like this has some
> precedent in t-vmsnative, but as Thomas noted it does make feature tests
> in gcc's configure somewhat ugly (but everything works well enough to
> build the compiler). The alternative here is to bundle all these files
> into a separate nvptx-tools package which users would have to download -
> something that would be nice to avoid.
>
> These tools currently require GNU extensions - something I probably
> ought to fix if we decide to add them to the gcc build itself.
Would these be more appropriate in binutils?

Jeff