On 03/20/2012 09:37 AM, drago01 wrote:
I'm a big fan of cross compilation, but introducing it into Fedora in order
to support ARM seems unlikely to succeed for too many reasons to go into.
The reasons are? ....
Okay, why not?
The ones off the top of my head, and this is by no means exhaustive:
1. Fedora Policy (Which I imagine is based on the technical foundation
of the following 5+ points and others I'm unaware of).
2. Many packages assume a native execution environment which will not
exist. Incredible undertaking to move 11000 packages to cross
compilation framework.
3. Absence of arm-linux cross compilers in the distribution.
4. If there were arm-linux cross compilers, how do you keep them in sync
with native gcc?
5. Where does the sys-root for an arm-linux cross compiler come from?
6. Would koji then be native/cross ambidextrous? Who is going to do that?
For all these reasons and more we're not proposing cross compilation for
ARM. Just doing so defies what it means to be PA.
The hardware is way slower ... so we can just build on faster hardware
(x86_64). Which is the only sane way to do it.
Trying to build on ARM directly is kind of a gimmick but nothing one
can seriously use to build a whole operating system. (Yes it works but
it is way to slow).
In couple years the hardware is going to be surprisingly comparable or
exceed to what you're see on x86, especially as the number of cores
skyrockets while the GHz continue to climb. It's not a gimmick, we're
just preparing for the future before it gets here. The only problem we
face is that those cores are in multiple CPUs so we can't 'make -j' our
way out of the build system problem.
--
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc@xxxxxxxxxx
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