[Arm-dev] Cross Compiling vs Native Compiling

[Johnny Hughes]

On 04/16/2015 04:02 AM, Gordan Bobic wrote:
> 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).

I agree that cross compiling should only be used for "intermediary" RPMs
for bootstrapping and the like and when both hardware and built package
dependencies are available, any bootstrap RPMs that had to be created
that way are then reproduced/rebuilt on real hardware.

The issue is just that sometimes cross compiling is not always exactly
the same.


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