Fwd: [patch 1/9] Nios II port, top-level configury

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 03/13/2013 03:37 PM, Joel Sherrill wrote:
> This is great news!  Thanks for putting the effort in Sebastian.
>
> I assume that very soon, we will see a similar push to get
> NIOS II support in gdb, newlib and gcc from the authors. I
> recall the normal pattern will have gdb and newlib next.

Well, adding the nios2 to newlib would be close to trivial, if the 
original Altera port didn't contain one vital file[1], which lacks 
proper licensing (It contains no license nor copyright, but it 
definitely is non-trivial copyrightable works)

I.e. unless Altera attaches a proper licensing to this file, Altera 
themselves submits it to newlib or somebody writes a clean room 
reimplementation, getting the nios2 into newlib will impossible.

Sebastian once asked somebody from Altera about it and they replied 
something along the lines of: "We ship it as part of our GCC-toolchains, 
but don't know who wrote it." :-)

Ralf

[1] Off-head, I don't recall which file it was, crt0.S/start.S or 
similar. I could look it up, if necessary.