For your consideration: Secondary Architectures in Fedora

[Brendan Conoboy]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-31 at 18:39 -0600, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
>> Or cross builds.  It would *really* make bootstrapping a new 
>> architecture easier if we had this ability. 
> 
> It's hard. When I tried cross-building for ARM and SH a long time ago, I
> ran into many problems, mostly with autotools.

It requires some small modifications to most packages.  In a lot of 
cases, it's simply improper use of the autotools (Looking for files in 
absolute paths instead of using the compiler, or running an executable 
to test for functionality instead of trusting headers, etc).

> The only really reliable solution I see would be full-system emulation.
> Which isn't always much faster than the real hardware, unfortunately.

Full system emulation is wrong for a number of reasons, performance is 
just one of them.  It requires fully functional emulators as a 
pre-requisite to building for the architecture, which is uncertain and 
unlikely.

What do you mean by reliable?  Once a package is setup to work in a 
cross environment, it builds quite reliably.  The main overhead is in 
getting the packages to be cross friendly in the first place.  Most 
autotools programs already are and they just don't know it.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com