Hello all, On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 2:41 AM, Rob Landley <rob@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Most packages don't cross compile at all. Debian has somewhere north of > 30,000 packages. Every project that does large scale cross compiling > (buildroot, gentoo embedded, timesys making fedora cross compile, etc) tends > to have about 200 packages that cross compile more or less easily, another > 400 or so that can be made to cross compile with _lot_ of effort and a large > enough rock, and then the project stalls at about that size. > Agreed, OpenEmbedded has a few thousands, but your point is valid. However, fleeing to target-native compilation is not the way to improve the situation IMHO. Moore's law on hardware also goes for the host, I think the progress is even bigger on big iron. Also, how much of the 30000 packages are useful for something like your own firmware Linux? > Distcc can take advantage of smp, but that won't help the ./configure stage > and I need to do some work on distcc to teach it to understand more gcc > If you want to build 1000+ packages, you don't need to run configure itself multithreaded. There are enough jobs available to keep 16/32 processors busy (beyond that, you probably end up in inter-package-dependencies stalling the build). This is just a guess from what I see during a multi-threaded bake and multi-threaded make on OpenEmbedded. > However, having one or more full-time engineers devoted to debugging > cross-compile issues is quite a high price to pay too. Moore's law really > doesn't help that one. > How about 30+ volunteers. > I'm not saying either solution is perfect, I'm just saying the "build under > emulation" approach is a viable alternative that gets more attractive as time > passes, both because of ongoing development on emulators and because of > Moore's law on the hardware. > I cannot follow your reasoning - Moore's law will help you more on the big iron side of things. That said, I welcome any effort (such as yours) to help improve the embedded Linux domain, I rather try to fix the cross-compile stuff of the few thousand packages I am interested in. Yes it hurts my brain. Regards, -- Leon -- 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
