On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 12:48 +1000, Russell Coker wrote: > On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 09:49, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'm reasonably far with the xscale big endian (armv5teb) port. Most > > things just work, it just takes a lot of time to compile-test things > > as I only have one 600MHz processor to work with (and crosscompiling > > is not an option because a lot of packages are simply broken with > > respect to that, hardcoding CC=gcc, etc.) I spent a lot of time trying to get the distro to cross-compile, a couple of years ago. The problem wasn't so much hardcoding CC, it was mostly the plethora of autocrap scripts which prevented portable cross-compilation. They'd run some test on the _host_ and make inferences about the behaviour/wordsize/etc of the _target_. Ban autotools and make people write proper makefiles, and the distro would cross-compile a lot better. :) > They apparently used binfmt_misc to recognise non-native binaries (I think it > was ARM from memory) on an i386 class build machine. The "interpreter" for > the binaries was a script that used ssh to login to an ARM server and launch > them (the ARM server NFS mounted the file systems from the i386 machine at > the same locations). This meant that all the autoconf tests which rely on > compiling a test program and executing it worked. I expect that you could do > the same. You can also use qemu for this. In fact I use qemu with binfmt_misc all the time on my Fedora/ppc box, for running stuff like acroread. Build yourself an ARM chroot, then do cunning things like replacing the toolchain with a 'native' i386->arm compiler so it goes nice and fast... (OK, we have to fix qemu-arm first but...) -- dwmw2
