Rust inside the chroot is showing it's age. The old toolchain depends on using its private LLVM branch and on its long deprecated makefile based build. With this upgrade, the rustllvm bindings are close enough to the system's LLVM to interoperate successfully. Additionally, some of the rust bootstrapping bugs have been ironed out making the upgrade easier than the failed 1.17 upgrade attempt.
The bulk of this issue is dealing with system LLVM which is ~5.0 while Rust builds against 4.0. Luckily the heavy lifting to upgrade to 5.0 has been done on Rust master and is being backported. See https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/43370 for the upstream tracking issue.
Comment 1 by bugdroid1@chromium.org
, Aug 31 2017