On Tuesday 10 June 2008 08:49:32 Wolfgang Denk wrote: > In message <87a5b0800806100625m5a6d20dao47b884bff663c24c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> you wrote: > > I'm not convinced it matters at all. Self hosting on an embedded > > architecture is, as has been mentioned, pretty pointless. > > YMMV... > > > system. For example I don't think I'll ever be able to self host a > > kernel build on a board with only 32Mb of on-board RAM. > > It depends. We've done this on board with as little as 16 MB RAM. There's also qemu. You can native build under emulation. In addition, if you have a cross compiler but don't want to spend all your time lying to ./configure, preventing gcc from linking against the host's zlib or grabbing stuff out of /usr/include that your target hasn't got, or trying to figure out why on EARTH the perl build decided to use x86 signal numbers when you built it for mips, you can build natively inside the emulator but use distcc to call out to the cross compiler through the virtual network. This uses the compiler for the heavy lifting of compilation _and_nothing_else_. (make runs natively inside the emulator, ./configure runs inside the emulator, headers are #included inside the emulator, libraries are linked inside the emulator, anything that wants to look at /proc or sysinfo does it natively inside the emulator...) And the thing is, QEMU is running on fast cheap x86 hardware with buckets of memory and disk space, and Moore's Law is doubling the power of it every 18 months (whereas it's making a lot of embedded stuff cheaper and have longer battery life instead, at least until we get to fully disposable computers). So yay using x86 as your build envionment, but building natively under emulation is now an alternative to trying to make cross compiling scale. Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-embedded" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
