For the latest version of this doc, please make sure to visit: Android Clang/LLVM Toolchain Readme Doc
The LLVM toolchain is primarily composed of the following projects:
Each of these projects has three important branches:
aosp/master
This is the branch that will be present in most platform trees. As such, platform components that use clang or LLVM will build against the headers and libraries in this branch.
This branch does not contain a full history. Updates to this are done via a squashed merge from the dev branch. Aside from updates, patches usually shouldn't be submitted to this branch. Any that are will need to be cherry-picked to dev.
aosp/dev
The primary purpose of this branch is allowing us to decouple the platform compilers from RenderScript and other platform components that depend on LLVM libraries. This means we can update the platform compilers even if RenderScript will need substantial modification for API changes.
Updates are performed in this branch, and the platform compilers are built from this branch.
aosp/upstream-master
This branch is an automatically updated direct mirror of the upstream master branch. This is a read only branch that is the merge source for updates to dev.
Rebases take place in the aosp/llvm tree. This tree is a manifest that uses the appropriate dev branches of each LLVM project and contains only the projects needed to build the platform compilers. Updates are done by merging from the aosp/upstream-master branch.
Conflicts are resolved manually and then a patch is produced to adapt Android.mk files (as well as to add/delete any updated source files). Prebuilts are then generated using these projects and placed into the proper prebuilts/clang/host subprojects.
The prebuilt projects contain multiple versions to make it easy to check in a new compiler that may not be ready to be enabled by default. Each new toolchain will add the following paths:
prebuilts/clang/host/linux-x86/clang-$BUILD_NUMBER prebuilts/clang/host/darwin-x86/clang-$BUILD_NUMBER prebuilts/clang/host/windows-x86/clang-$BUILD_NUMBER
In order to prepare for the actual rebase (including updating dependent projects), we will copy each external/ aosp/dev project to its corresponding external/ aosp/master project as a squashed single CL. This makes rollbacks simpler, and it also reduces churn on the Android build servers. This also has the side effect of not spamming non-Android @google.com committers to upstream LLVM projects, since their commits will be batched up into a single copy commit on each tracked external/ project.
Prebuilts for llvm-rs-cc and bcc_compat also need to be generated for prebuilts/sdk. This is done by running frameworks/rs/update_rs_prebuilts.sh on both Mac and Linux. This is done from the normal AOSP platform tree rather than the LLVM tree. After this completes, the prebuilts/sdk project will have a prepared branch/CL that can be uploaded for review/commit.
If we find a host-side bug that needs to be fixed, it may trigger an update of the host prebuilts (i.e. rebase). Device-side fixes can be pushed directly to external/ aosp/master and then copied to external/ aosp/dev to speed up the process (assuming that it doesn’t affect the host builds).
The upstream repositories are automatically mirrored to the aosp/upstream-master branch. Update with git fetch aosp upstream-master.
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