Re: towards a good embedded userland cross-build system

[Dan Kegel <dank at kegel dot com>]

Wookey wrote:
> On the other hand I've been quite impressed with erik Andersen's makefiles
> for uclinux gcc building. I need to take a look at Dan's crosstool and
> Robert's stuff too. I do think that running the test-suite stuff is a really
> imnportant feature. I've had enough trouble with this game to know that I'd
> really like the test suite run....

Indeed.  I put a *lot* of work into figuring out how to run the
test suite, documenting what I learned, and automating the process.
And, for that matter, I put a lot of work into submitting patches to LTP
so it would run properly on embedded systems that use busybox
and not bash.)

Spending the time to run the testsuites and resolve the
problems they found seems to have been worth it, since
when I finally built a kernel with the new compiler, it booted
first try, and seems to run fine.
It truly is sweet to be able to know in advance of building
a kernel and booting it that it's likely to work.

> Anyway - all of this work is good stuff - things are definately improving
> due to these various efforts. 

Crosstool now incorporates ptxdist -- I use it to build
a complete minimal userland, since that's required in
some situations to run anything -- and I'm really happy with
how it's working.  IMHO ptxdist is a project with its head
in the right place; their build system is simple enough that
it didn't make my head explode, and it is well-suited
to the needs of the embedded developer who is using
either glibc or uclibc.  The fact that I was able to use ptxdist as
a building block is a good sign.
- Dan

--
Dan Kegel
http://www.kegel.com
http://counter.li.org/cgi-bin/runscript/display-person.cgi?user=78045


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