On Mon, Aug 30, 2010, Pedro I. Sanchez wrote:
Well, I have several v5 boards I could use for testing. Bootstrap code and U-Boot issues are sorted out already and I could concentrate on Linaro's toolchain and rootfs components initially. I can also allocate a 64-bit Ubuntu 10.04 machine to do builds. Would this help?
I'd need help getting started with the whole build process but I'll be glad to put some effort into this. I'm really interested in getting the v5 port up and running soon.
So there are two ways we currently do builds: * automated native builds * manual cross-builds
The former is the classical Debian/Ubuntu archive setup, and we currently provide only an ARMv7A Thumb2 VFPv3D16 reference archive based on the Ubuntu armel port. Debian provides a base armel archive built for ARMv4T. If you want to go that route it's the one which will allow you to build the largest amount of packages for v5, but you'll need to rebootstrap the port starting from Debian because the Ubuntu binaries don't run on your hardware. The process is basically: - copy Debian archive into Linaro armv5 bootstrap_archive - setup chroot from bootstrap_archive - grab Linaro toolchain sources and change the defaults to armv5 instead of armv7, build by hand, put in target_archive - for all source packages - pull source package from source_archive - build using bootstrap_archive + target_archive binaries - upload to target_archive Eventually, you'll have more and more packages in the target_archive, and after some rebuild cycles, a bootstraped armv5 archive from sources out of source_archive.
The latter approach is using cross-compilation, which is technically possible with Debian/Ubuntu tools, but very fragile and almost not automated at all. There are multiple tools to help you cross-compile from existing binaries, so that you don't have to break all the build-deps loops, but it's still a very manual process. Peter Pearse (ppearse on IRC) is working his way doing an armv5 and an armv6 cross-rebuild; you should ping him to hear how he is doing it exactly! :-) Cc:ing him.