One output from the 11.09 release was a reasonably painless way of cross-building whole images against an archive, which also forms the basis for an auto-crossbuilder.
There is a HOWTO (for building linaro-nano images) here: https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/CrossBuildNano (It uses armel as the example, but should work the same for armhf) Summary of process ------------------ Essentially you can generate a cross-building chroot in one command (using multistrap), chroot into that (using schroot), and give the builder (xbuilder-simple) a list of packages to build - either a pre-generated one for an image, or your own. It chunters through and builds them all (using xdeb), and leaving build-logs for each package. Then at the end (from outside the chroot) you cross-generate an image from the debs (using multistrap, but the pile could be input for a different tool if you prefer). ------------------ To make this work usefully against a stable (natty) baseline, updated versions of both tools and packages are in two PPAs at: https://launchpad.net/~linaro-foundations/+archive/cross-build-tools and https://launchpad.net/~linaro-foundations/+archive/cross-alip Caveats ------- This is currently a technology demonstration in so far as some of the packages needed for a nano image don't successfully cross-build, so you can't actually currently cross-build all of it, but that should be fixed quite soon. Anyone who wants to help with that is very welcome. I've filed current status and remaining bugs here: https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/DevPlatform/CrossCompile/LinaroNanoStatus The autobuilder can actually run just as well using pdebuild-cross as xdeb to do the build-work, but that's not been tested for a while and is not covered in the HOWTO. The existing xbuilder is pretty stupid (that's why it's called xbuilder-simple) and it does not yet fully ensure a clean build environment every time (when using xdeb, it should if using pbuilder-cross), but it does enough to work reasonably well in practice. A more rigorous environment reset is on the list of improvements RSN. Ongoing work ------------ The current focus is on getting the remaining packages cross-building so that the whole process works to completeion without cheating by bringing in pre-built packages from the existing archive (That's a useful way to proceed if you want to use this tech today - just adjust the multistrap config to include the base natty armel/armhf archive too) Once this is completed I'll be setting up a continuously-running autobuilder so that the cross-buildability or otherwise of packages can be more easily discovered and more people can get involved in fixing up packages so that cross-building of larger images becomes realistic. It should be a simple matter of three multistrap config file changes to use this on an oneiric base, but it broke in a painfull mess of bind-mounts of deleted /run dirs when I tried it last week, so I'd hold off that for a little while, and stick with the nice natty-based examples. I'll add destructions to the HOWTO when I've got it going. I hope some of you find this useful, or at least interesting. I could really use some help on fixing up breakage in assorted packages, and this HOWTO makes it easy to set up a consistent build environment, so do give it a try and get stuck in if you'd like to see this working fully sooner rather than later. Reports of success, breakage, miserable failure, or how this almost-but-doesn't-quite address your use case are always welcome of course. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ _______________________________________________ linaro-dev mailing list linaro-dev@lists.linaro.org http://lists.linaro.org/mailman/listinfo/linaro-dev
