Monday, June 19, 2017

nanotoconf

I finally fixed issues in 'build' with Windows file names. Also made some more minor changes, udpated the documentation, and published that over the week-end. This means that 'build' now has some support for auto-configuration in a manner similar to autoconf. I'm tempted to rename the project as nanotoconf

That got me a few comments, including a request to add cross-compilation. This is not complicated.

But I'm surprised to see that cross-compilers do not select the correct include paths and libraries without a --sysroot option:

build> cat test.c
#include 
int main()
{
    printf("Hello worldn");
}
build> arm-linux-gnu-gcc test.c -o /tmp/test
test.c:1:10: fatal error: stdio.h: No such file or directory
 #include 
          ^~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.

Why do you need to specify the -I option, e.g.:

build> arm-linux-gnu-gcc -I /usr/arm-linux-gnu/include -c test.c

What is the point of having a cross-compiler wrapper if you still have to manually search for include files and libraries?

Spice

More discussion on the why and how of a flight recorder, and its applications for Spice.

Flight recorder

Still looking for a good way to export performance-like data. The fact that the flight recorder uses a printf-like format is a bit problematic for that objective.

Clearly, I don't want to have multiple flight recorder instrumentation probes. I would like the same instrumentation probe to provide data for all the use cases.

On this topic, interesting talk about tracing in QEMU: