Re: [Qemu-devel] ANN: DetaolB v0.4 is released

[Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>]

On Wednesday 04 July 2007 16:11:19 Christian MICHON wrote:
> On 7/4/07, Cedric Hombourger <chombourger@gmail.com> wrote:
> > You may want to look at crosskit.sourceforge.net
>
> thanks for this hint.
>
> > I haven't looked at detaoib yet but it was surely created before crosskit
> > and may therefore be a safer bet.
>
> DetaolB aims to be a native solution, not a cross compiling tool.
> I've to get to the point where a native sparc32 toolchain will be usable
> in detaolb-sparc32...

What's the difference between deltaolb and Firmware Linux, anyway?  I'm still 
curious about this.

Firmware Linux currently builds both working cross-compilers and minimal 
native build environments you can boot into for qemu.  It does this for x86, 
x86-64, armv4-soft and armv5-vfp (both OABI, I'll probably move the v5 to 
EABI when I get around to it), and both endiannesses of mips.  It also does 
sparc32 (although there's a bug, probably in uClibc, which I have yet to 
track down that screws up console initialization, so init=/bin/hello 
prints "hello world" for both static and dynamic, but init=/bin/sh hangs.)  
And I've got a working powerpc cross compiler that builds a root filesystem 
but have yet to build a kernel qemu can boot.

The theory I've been going on is that once you've got a minimal native build 
environment, you boot into it and build the rest of what you need in there 
for your target platform.  The next release will come with a setup script to 
let you run Firmware Linux under itself.  (And thus cross compile from arm to 
mips or equally silly things.)  A friend of mine built 60 gentoo packages 
under the thing before he got bored, although he was using an x86 chroot 
rather than qemu.  I'm trying to get _that_ script into the next release as 
well, and then tackle Ubuntu starting from 
http://www.quietearth.us/articles/2006/08/16/Building-deb-package-from-source

Plus the distcc cross compile thing.  I've now got networking working on arm 
(qemu's arm PCI controller can't do PIO yet, so I needed to switch from ne2k 
to rtl8139 setup for mmio, then networking worked fine) so setting up distcc 
is mostly a matter of making a cross compiler that does C++ as well.  Not 
sure if it should be the bootstrap one or if I should build a second copy...

Oh, by the way, the Fedora for Arm project is also building natively on arm, 
but they got some fast ARM hardware and stuck lots of DRAM and hard drive 
space onto it rather than using QEMU.

Rob
-- 
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
  - Ken Thompson.