[Arm-dev] Cross Compiling vs Native Compiling

[Gordan Bobic]

On 2015-04-16 09:52, Mandar Joshi wrote:
> Hello everybody,
> This part is mentioned in my GSoC proposal but I thought I should
> bring it up here as well.
> 
> How do you feel about taking a slightly different approach to ARM
> development? Viz. Cross Compiling. We could use existing
> infrastructure x86,x86_64 servers to build packages for ARMv7.
> 
> This will require writing some plugins for Yum, Mock & Koji based on
> work done by msalter from RedHat. I am referring to this post
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-buildsys-list/2009-July/msg00000.html
> 
> The way I see it, cross compiling will get packages compiled faster
> and would be easy to setup. We won't have to rely of ARM Hardware from
> online.net

This idea is not new, and is often used for early bootstrapping,
or even intermediate builds (e.g. using distcc) but IIRC it has been
a long standing policy with Fedora that the final binaries must be
compiled natively. This stems from various compiler quirks that may
manifest in one case but not the other.

Having said that, the usefulness of large scale cross-compiling has
been steadily reducing as availability of less slow ARM hardware
has been increasing (it is now easy to get reasonably cheap ARM
machines with 4-8 CPU cores and 3-4GB of RAM).

Gordan