I'm trying to do an unregistered build of ghc, using the cross-port script. However, compilation aborts at the following point:
haskell/b1/libraries/base > ../../ghc/compiler/ghc-inplace -ldl -fglasgow-exts -cpp -Iinclude -funbox-strict-fields -package-name base -O -H24m -keep-hc-files-too -optc-DNO_REGS -optc-DUSE_MINIINTERPRETER -fno-asm-mangling -funregisterised -fvia-C -split-objs -c GHC/Base.lhs -o GHC/Base.o
The problem appears to be a conflict between '-split-objs' and '-fno-asm-mangling' (which, together with '-funregisterised', is supposed to have been replaced by '-unreg' now, if I'm not mistaken).
However, -split-objs seems to be required for building libraries, whereas -fno-asm-mangling is probably needed for an unregisterised build (I'm just guessing here...).
Turn off splitting by adding the line 'SplitOjbs=NO' to your mk/build.mk file (create one if you don't have it). Splitting is entirely optional. BTW the cross-port script is a little old, so you might find other problems. As far as I know, unregisterised compilation *does* work though. You might run into problems with the libraries, for two reasons: some of them are built via hsc2hs which encodes some platform-specific information into the Haskell source, and some of them rely on configure-generated information, again in the Haskell source. Both of these problems lead to non-portable Haskell and hence non-portable unregisterised .hc files. Your best bet for the .hsc files is to generate the .hs on your Alpha/Linux box by taking the intermediate _hsc.c files over and compiling/running them on the target machine to get the .hs files. Then take the .hs back to the bootstrapping machine and carry on. These are the libraries in stage 1, BTW. For the configure-generated options (eg. GHC/Posix.hs uses a bunch of types from config.h), you might have to temporarily substitute a config.h built on the target box when compiling this file to .hc. The cross-port script also tries to do too much. You won't be able to actually run the b2 compiler on your bootstrap box, because it will be built against the Alpha/Linux-specific libraries, so just stop after you've got a set of .hc files for ghc/compiler in stage 2. Take the library .hc files from stage 1, and the compiler .hc files from stage 2, to your Alpha/Linux box. At some point we'll try to make all this easier, but I'm afraid that's the way it is at the moment :-( Cheers, Simon