On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 03:13:35PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > > Buildd doesn't support cross-building. Ignoring that, I still wouldn't > recommend it; although there is rudimentary support for cross-building > of packages (by virtue of dpkg-cross and toolchain-source), it isn't > fully supported: first, dpkg-buildpackage will not check for > -$arch-cross packages when testing for build-dependencies; second, > dpkg-cross will need some more work to be fully useful (most notably, it > doesn't distinguish between architecture-independent and and > architecture-specific packages, so it breaks dependencies on > architecture-independent packages); and last but not least, policy > doesn't mandate that packages have to be cross-buildable, so many will > simply fail to build. Thanks! Those are some very good points. > > The fastest SH machine I know of is a Dreamcast, and that is still > > slow (200Mhz, 16MB). > > Heh. Having an m68k buildd background, that is, well... you get the idea > ;-) (pictures a room full of SE/30's) :) > What you'd need is a few (say, 3 to 5; although we'd need more initally > to bootstrap a fully-functional sid environment) Dreamcast machines with > some sort of an Ethernet network connection (do those exist?) Yes, but they are getting hard to find and expensive. Maybe someone will find out how to hook up an PCI/ISA expander card to the Dreamcast's internal bus. You can hook up a IDE HDD: http://home.b00.itscom.net/ikehara/dc/dcwdc.html > and a kernel that will not hang when it tries to swap over the network > (there are some patches out there that allow this); you could then put > them next to a file- or diskserver, and start building. Granted, this > is likely not optimal, but that doesn't mean it won't work. Interesting. I had the idea of mounting an AFS root filesystem using the kernel AFS client in 2.6, but I never managed to get a boot cd with 2.6 built for my system. Ideally I would just have a CD with redboot on it, and it would pull the kernel across the network via bootp/tftp, and mount / across the network, so I would rarely if ever have to update the CD. > Yes, a Dreamcast is getting slow by today's standards; but so are many > of the architectures Debian supports; m68k is one, but MIPS, ARM, and > SPARC (as opposed to sparc64) aren't the fastest systems anymore either; > still, they're all supported. Speed is not an issue for autobuilders. > They're non-interactive anyway (except when things break every once in > a while), so if they're too slow, you just add more and be done with it. > If you don't have enough diskspace, you add diskspace "somewhere" on the > network. If you don't have enough RAM, you add swapspace. well, I'm seriously glad it is that painless. People are selling DC machine with broken controller ports (a common problem) for very cheap usually, so maybe these make good/cheap machines for a build farm. > [...I know *@!# about the SH ABI...] > > If someone makes a decision regarding these issues, sets up some basic > SH machines, and gives me a shell account, then I could install buildd, > configure it, and get it running; if that happens today (heh, yeah right > ;-), we could be building SH binaries by tomorrow. Consider this a > standing offer to help out :-) I think that's what it comes down to. Someone with the necessary knowledge needs to just throw down the gauntlet and say "This is what we are doing". I doubt we are going to get Hitachi to redefine their ABI, so we will need to either live with it or do things our own way for the sake of practicality. -- Ryan Underwood, <nemesis@icequake.net>
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