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

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org>]

On Wed, 2004-08-11 at 12:48 +1000, Russell Coker wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Aug 2004 09:49, Lennert Buytenhek <buytenh 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.)

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