The Espressif fork of LLVM now has Xtensa support in the linker LLD.
(This support was written mosly by me). This means we don't have to use
the Espressif GNU toolchain anymore and makes installing TinyGo simpler.
In the future, this also paves the way for ThinLTO support. Right now it
is mostly just a way to simplify TinyGo installation and speed up CI
slightly.
Switch over to LLVM 14 for static builds. Keep using LLVM 13 for regular
builds for now.
This uses a branch of the upstream Espressif branch to fix an issue,
see: https://github.com/espressif/llvm-project/pull/59
This is for consistency with Clang, which always adds a CPU flag even if
it's not specified in CFLAGS.
This commit also adds some tests to make sure the Clang target-cpu
matches the CPU property in the JSON files.
This does have an effect on the generated binaries. The effect is very
small though: on average just 0.2% increase in binary size, apparently
because Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 are compiled a bit differently. However,
when rebased on top of https://github.com/tinygo-org/tinygo/pull/2218
(minsize), the difference drops to -0.1% (a slight decrease on average).
This can be very useful for some purposes:
* It makes it possible to disable the UART in cases where it is not
needed or needs to be disabled to conserve power.
* It makes it possible to disable the serial output to reduce code
size, which may be important for some chips. Sometimes, a few kB can
be saved this way.
* It makes it possible to override the default, for example you might
want to use an actual UART to debug the USB-CDC implementation.
It also lowers the dependency on having machine.Serial defined, which is
often not defined when targeting a chip. Eventually, we might want to
make it possible to write `-target=nrf52` or `-target=atmega328p` for
example to target the chip itself with no board specific assumptions.
The defaults don't change. I checked this by running `make smoketest`
before and after and comparing the results.
With this change, it is possible to fully use CGo on ESP32/ESP8266
chips. The following will work:
tinygo flash -target=d1mini -port=/dev/ttyUSB0 ./testdata/cgo/
tinygo flash -target=esp32-mini32 -port=/dev/ttyUSB0 ./testdata/cgo/
Previously it would produce output like the following:
/tmp/tinygo905539688/main.o:(.literal.runtime.run$1$gowrapper+0x150): undefined reference to `strcpy'
/tmp/tinygo905539688/main.o:(.literal.runtime.run$1$gowrapper+0x154): undefined reference to `strlen'
This has been a *lot* of work, trying to understand the Xtensa windowed
registers ABI. But in the end I managed to come up with a very simple
implementation that so far seems to work very well.
I tested this with both blinky examples (with blinky2 slightly edited)
and ./testdata/coroutines.go to verify that it actually works.
Most development happened on the ESP32 QEMU fork from Espressif
(https://github.com/espressif/qemu/wiki) but I also verified that it
works on a real ESP32.
Right now this requires setting the -port parameter, but other than that
it totally works (if esptool.py is installed). It works by converting
the ELF file to the custom ESP32 image format and flashing that using
esptool.py.
This is only very minimal support. More support (such as tinygo flash,
or peripheral access) should be added in later commits, to keep this one
focused.
Importantly, this commit changes the LLVM repo from llvm/llvm-project to
tinygo-org/llvm-project. This provides a little bit of versioning in
case something changes in the Espressif fork. If we want to upgrade to
LLVM 11 it's easy to switch back to llvm/llvm-project until Espressif
has updated their fork.
Ayke van Laethem