Ports to other architectures was Re: Fedora Core on the Alpha

[Russell Coker]

On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 09:49, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh at wantstofly.org> 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.)

At a FOSDEM a couple of years ago I think that some Nokia people gave a talk 
on what they are doing in this regard.

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 use an iPaQ for this, the USB networking is fast enough for the NFS 
operations needed for autoconf tests, and an Athlon or P4 CPU should do well 
for compiles.

As for CC=gcc, that's easy to solve.  Change $PATH so that /usr/local/arm-bin 
is the first entry.

> CPPFLAGS=" -I/usr/X11R6/include -Dlinux -D__arm__ -D__arm32__ -U__arm -Uarm
> -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=199309L -D_POSIX_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE -D_BSD_SOURCE
> -D_SVID_SOURCE -DFUNCPROTO=15 -DNARROWPROTO -DXVENDORNAME=The X.Org
> Foundation -DXVENDORNAMESHORT=X.Org "
>
> configure then fails with:
>
> checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C
> compiler cannot create executables
>
> quite simply because "X.Org" and "Foundation" are not valid gcc options.
> Ho hum.

Well it looks like there are quotes missing from around 'The X.Org Foundation' 
but apart from that it shouldn't be a problem.  -DX=y is a fine parameter for 
GCC.

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