GCC 15 on 10.6.8 natively on PowerPC

[barracuda156]

@iains Some good news, I built gcc master on 10.6.8 running natively on G5. No MacPorts involvement, no hacks to darwin.h anymore.
Used Xcode 3.2.6 with some Unix tools sourced from 10a190 (they could be rebuilt from source, but did not get to that yet), built gcc 10.3.0 from your tree, used that to build gcc master.

(On a side note, I can finally deal with gfortran testing.)

Anything relevant we would like to test specifically?

P. S. The OS has some things to fix, as of now. The two crucial issues are: DNS not working (so no internet) and the kernel refuses to load with more than 4 GB RAM (boot args work, so no need to pull out physical sticks).

[barracuda156]

@iains Iain, a quick question: on 10a190 gcc needed a minor fix to darwin.h (which, I believe, you were aware of): https://github.com/macos-powerpc/powerpc-ports/blob/5436c8a4d117a80a3aba10eedf151355ecfa3b8c/lang/gcc-powerpc/files/0001-darwin.h-adjust-for-10.6-ppc.patch
Now, on 10.6.8 this is not needed anymore.

Since both issues with 10.6.8 image were solved (DNS via TCP for now, but internet works, and RAM constraint removed), I am probably switching to 10.6.8 for everything. However, it is perhaps desirable for a while to maintain compatibility with 10a190, as long as nothing much is sacrificed.

As far as I remember from early builds of gcc11 on Rosetta for usage in 10a190, gcc with the patch above (or very similar) worked fine on both systems. (Take it with a grain of salt, it was long back and testing amounted to actual usage but not running proper tests.) Assuming it works fine on 10.6.8 natively too, is it problematic to have it built this way when it is not required anymore? I.e. just in order to have software still compatible with 10a190.

[barracuda156]

Okay, I actually decided to forego 10a190 compatibility in favor of avoiding unnecessary linking. gcc 14.2.0 built without any patches to darwin.h is confirmed to work perfectly fine on 10.6.8 ran on powerpc natively. I have no reason to use 10a190 now, and perhaps no one has.

[iains]

well, at this point, I am just an observer as far as PPC is concerned - no longer any viable hardware to test - so I build cross-compilers from time to time - but that's it.

I guess you should document what (exactly) is needed to get ppc to run 10.6.8 with > 4G of RAM and on G5...

Hopefully, relatively soon I should have a gcc-10.5-darwin branch with support across the whole range (just trying to get Sequoia to play nicely at the moment) - would be great to test that on a live PPC system.