Re: Setting up a Build System for ARMEL packages
+++ 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/
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