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Catalyst

Content:

1.  Project Description

The Gentoo catalyst project develops and supports the catalyst release building tool. The design of catalyst is meant to be easy to use, cutomize, and maintain. It is also used in other Gentoo projects, such as GNAP.

2.  Documentation

The catalyst FAQ attempts to answer commonly asked questions related to catalyst and its usage.

3.  Project Goals

The goal of the catalyst project is to provide a single multi-faceted tool that can reliably build all aspects of a Gentoo Linux release: stage tarballs, GRP package sets, and install CDs.

Our specific development goals for catalyst include the following: ensuring it provides high-quality builds of Gentoo Linux, and for the tool to be easy to use, customize, extend and maintain. The catalyst tool is intended to be used by those who wish to create their own customized versions of Gentoo Linux, or their own customized LiveCDs. Our goal is to make catalyst a powerful tool that's a pleasure to use, and to ensure that the code we write is maintainable and of high-quality.

4.  Developers

Developer Nickname Role
Chris Gianelloni wolf31o2 Lead ( Design lead )

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

5.  Supported Architectures

Catalyst supports a number of architectures. In catalyst-speak, an "architecture" is a general type of CPU platform. Here is a complete list of architectures supported by catalyst:

Architecture Description
alpha The Alpha processor (all flavors)
amd64 AMD's 64-bit platform, also known as "Opteron" or "x86-64". This also includes Intel EM64T machines.
arm ARM-based processors
hppa HP's PA-RISC systems
ia64 Intel's Itanium 64-bit platform (Itanium Classic and Itanium 2)
mips MIPS-based systems
ppc 32-bit PowerPC platforms, including original PowerPC systems, and Apple's G3, G4 and G5 in 32-bit mode
ppc64 64-bit PowerPC platforms, including IBM power chips and Apple's G5 in 64-bit mode
s390 IBM's S/390 platform, including zSeries machines
sh 32-bit SuperH-based systems
sparc 32-bit Sparc-based systems
sparc64 64-bit Sparc-based systems
x86 Intel-compatible 32-bit CPU, ranging from i386 to Pentium 4 and Athlon XP.

For each architecture, catalyst supports a number of "sub-architectures." A sub-architecture is a specific variant of the architecture. For example, pentium4 is a sub-architecture of the x86 architecture. Here is a list of all sub-architectures supported by catalyst:

Architecture Sub-architectures
alpha alpha ev4 ev45 ev5 ev56 pca56 ev6 ev67
amd64 amd64
arm arm
hppa hppa
ia64 ia64
mips mips mips1 mips2 mips3 mips4 mipsel mipsel1 mipsel2 mipsel3 mipsel4 cobalt
ppc ppc power-ppc g3 g4
ppc64 ppc64 power3 power4 power5 g5
s390 s390
sparc sparc
sparc64 sparc64
x86 x86 i386 i486 i586 i686 pentium-mmx athlon athlon-xp athlon-mp pentium3 pentium4

You'll notice that all architectures have a sub-architecture with the same name as the architecture. This sub-architecture is meant to represent a "generic" build that should work on all systems in that architecture.Each sub-architecture has an associated set of CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, as well as a CHOST and set of USE variables that are enabled on that sub-architecture. The USE settings are intended to enable any CPU-specific options, such as mmx or altivec.

Note: Catalyst currently also supports the ability to build x86 architecture stages on amd64 systems.



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Summary: This project develops the catalyst tool, which is used to build official Gentoo stage tarballs, PackageCD and InstallCD and LiveCD images.

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