Cross Compile Mips / Linux

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

<nickpreiser at hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1136935894.936264.246810 at g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Hi Everyone,

> Should I try using a Linux based machine for the build,  would that
> help??

YES -

The problem is that the Linux build tools generally assume that they are
sitting in the target environment and therefore tries to use facilites
discovered by the tools and discoveries about "endianess" and such; This is
a general problem with the design of the Linux build system - the "I am on
the target" assumptions are likely to be "smeared" over many applications.

WindRiver (an embedded Linux provider) f.ex. makes a living off - amongst
other things - providing an environment enabling Linux+applications to be
reliably cross compiled!

What we prefer to do is to use a "King-Size" version of the target hardware
with a full set of tools and libraries to build on and then pack a file
system with just the built Kernel + Application(s) for the target into an
"initrd image" (
http://www.tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/initrd.html ) and
have the real target download & boot that.

This is because we are often doing tricky stuff with "new" CPU's where the
Kernel is barely ready so we like to be sure that the bugs are in the code
and not freebies provided by the cross compiler tools.

 ... and the latest embedded target happens to be an 8-Way Opteron card with
16 GB RAM that does not take eons to compile ;-)