The joy of libclang in Yocto
----------------------------
Once upon a time I was asked to introduce libclang in our yocto build.
The back story, abridged version, is about a certain team that
requires a certain tool for certain logic to be copied and pasted from
another project.
In case you're not aware of it, yocto uses GCC for C and C++.
As far as I know there are efforts aiming at integrating Clang to it,
but in our case we are just interested in libclang, not in the
compiler.
The task seemed a little complex, so I started with a preliminary
study, trying to figure out how difficult this could be.
The compilation of the library is not complicated itself, but even
restricting the build to the library alone requires around 2 hours.
By tweaking the compilation a little, I could shrink down the final
image size to 150 MiB, which is quite a lot, but better than the
original 500 MiB. I wish the management was convinced by this data,
but it clearly wasn't enough. I started to delve into the task.
Let's mention the good news first: since this is about code
generation, I don't need to build it for the target machine.
The build is just needed for the Host and for the SDK. If you who are
reading this journal entry are not experienced in Yocto, you might be
wondering what that means. By Host I mean the "regular" build
environment within Yocto. The SDK is a self-contained and installable
build environment that enables a workstation to build software for the
target platform without having Yocto installed. The software that is
distributed with the SDK is effectively cross compiled as it was a
different architecture
With the previous paragraph hopefully giving enough context, it is
time to mention that the build system of of Clang requires certain
tools that are compiled on the fly, and invoked afterwards, by the
very same build system.
Since however this is a cross-build, the Clang build system will fail
while trying to execute the executables it has just built.
Those executables are in fact tailored for the SDK.
What I need is to force the CMake of Clang to use those that I
compiled in the host.
Since the tools are made for the SDK, they can't be executed, since
they're pointing at a non-existent linker script (expected to exist
under /opt/infn-xr/..., where it will not be installed until the SDK
is installed, so this is a chicken-egg problem.
Since the tools are not meant to be found in the system root, the
cmake configuration will restrict the search path to the build path
Therefore I need to patch cmake configuration.
Since the tools are not meant for installation, the cmake
configuration will not declare them as installable.
Therefore, again, I need to patch cmake configuration.
Patching cmake configuration implies the invalidation of the Shared
State Cache of Yocto, which means I have to endure two hours of
rebuild at each attempt.
