[fpc-pascal] Cross-compiler for ARM64 on Windows available?

[Tomas Hajny]

On 2022-06-21 00:14, Pierre Muller via fpc-pascal wrote:
> Le 20/06/2022 à 23:53, Sven Barth via fpc-pascal a écrit :
>> Am 20.06.2022 um 12:34 schrieb Wolfgang Hubert via fpc-pascal:


Hi Pierre (and others ;-) ),

  .
  .
>> Windows on AArch64 is currently only supported in main thus you need 
>> to
>> compile it yourself (see also
>> https://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-announce/2020-April/000614.html
>> ). Also there are still some errors for which the origins haven't been
>> found yet, so your mileage may vary...
> 
>   You might also try this "completely untested" cross-installer:
> ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/snapshot/trunk/aarch64-win64/fpc-3.3.1.aarch64-win64.built.on.x86_64-linux.tar.gz
> See:
> ftp://ftp.freepascal.org/pub/fpc/snapshot/trunk/aarch64-win64/README-fpc-3.3.1.aarch64-win64.built.on.x86_64-linux

I just tried to follow the advice above. Compiling the cross-compiler 
(Win32 hosted) is no problem using the fullcycle target (obviously, I 
could build just the particular compiler for AArch64 instead of all of 
them, but that isn't important) - so far so good. However, it already 
fails when trying to build the aarch64-win64 rtl using this 
cross-compiler, because the compiler complains about missing assembler 
aarch64-win64-clang.exe. Do we provide (compiled) win32 or win64 hosted 
binutils providing support for aarch64-win64 target? FWIW, I checked the 
contrib directory on our FTP, but didn't find anything useful in this 
regard there either.

In order to check that, I downloaded your "cross-installer" mentioned 
above, but it contains win32 hosted builds of binutils named 
x86_64-win64-*.exe, i.e. supposedly aimed at targetting Win64 on x86_64, 
but not usable together with the included ppca64.exe binary (because the 
included ppca64.exe binary is a native compiler for aarch64-win64, 
whereas the binutils only run under win32/win64; moreover, they do not 
fit the subdirectory bin/aarch64-win64/ included in the .tar.gz file). 
And just as a funny fact, the included x86_64-win64-objdump.exe does not 
even recognize the AArch64 architecture ;-) (tried with the ppca64.exe 
binary) - not surprisingly, because it's version 2.26 compiled in 
January 2016.

Conclusion:

1) Packaging of the "cross-installer" mentioned above should be revised 
(specifically, the binutils should be replaced with something more 
appropriate).

2) We should provide the appropriate cross-binutils, otherwise even 
suggesting people to compile the ppca64.exe compiler from trunk/main FPC 
themselves doesn't help much.

3) It might be time for updating the provided Win32 binutils as well - 
version 2.28 of objdump included with the latest release of FPC (and 
also included in the fpcbuild repository in both the win32 and win64 
subdirectories under install/) doesn't support/recognize the AArch64 
architecture yet.

Tomas