+++ Jeff Hoogland [2011-06-13 22:30 -0500]: > Howdy All, > > I was wondering what is the best way to set up for building ARMEL packages?
That's actually a complicated question with no simple answer. It depends what you want to build (Debian packages, your own software, upstream tarballs, android stuff, openembedded stuff, buildroot images), and how often you want to build it (once or over and over again because you are working on it). And whether you are targetting an existing distro ABI (armel debian or ubuntu) or some other flavour (e.g. ARM v6+vfp). > I've got an N900 and I've got an Android tablet in the mail - it is simplest > to > just build on those systems themselves or will it be better in the long run to > get some sort of build system going on my plain old laptop? In short, yes, it's simplest to build natively on the target architecture, especially if building Debian packages (Which I assume is your purpose - you don't say explicitly). This is the most reliable way of getting correct code where the target system is Debian armel, and is how Debian is designed to be built and how it is built for the distro. You have all the normal tools at your disposal: apt-get build-dep, dpkg-buildpackage and so on. But of course with currently available hardware it's not that fast. This is rapidly getting better, but may still be annoying if you are building a non-trival package repeatedly, or whole sets of packages (in which case the first question is why are the distro-supplied ones not adequate). Cross-building can work, is sometimes appropriate, and sometimes necessary. Support exists within Debian, and this is a good page to start on for info about what tools to use: https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/CrossBuilding I'm in the process of adding a 'quickstart' page to help newcomers to decide what approach to take. (Hmm, looks like I forgot to hit save before my browser crashed last time - bum - doncha just hate that...). > I've spent the last couple days trying to get a QEMU working but kept running > into various road blocks. I finally got a chroot ARM environment setup with > QEMU, however when I try to run dpkg-depcheck -d I get and strace failure and > a > QEMU failure message. QEMU building is no faster than native building on typical arm hardware unless you carefully set things up to use a native (i.e build architecture) compiler behind the scenes. If you want to take this approach I'd suggest just submitting jobs to the Open Build System where they have already set it all up. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
