Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development [LWN.net]

Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Posted Apr 29, 2010 11:06 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development by warmcat
Parent article: Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Most of the distros you mentioned are cross-built which has quite some costs associated with it for a large packageset.

Based on my experiences (which involved cross-building on Linux for a funny embedded BSD-derivative), by far the biggest grief with cross-building was that most packages use "autoconfiguring" that pokes around the build environment and assumes the target is the same. Software with the old-school "manually edit the makefile and then build" approach is much easier to deal with. Another source of frustration was build processes that create binaries and then run them as part of the building.

Software projects could make things much easier for cross-builders by avoiding the abovementioned things. Linuxes are now so like each other that a makefile with no autoconfigure step would work in most cases. at least is should exist as an alternate build method.

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Tools and distributions for embedded Linux development

Posted Apr 29, 2010 11:32 UTC (Thu) by warmcat (guest, #26416) [Link]

> by far the biggest grief with cross-building was that most packages use "autoconfiguring"

Right I also spent a lot of time getting a few dozen basic packages to crossbuild in the past (good luck with perl!), that's part of the reason I am such an enthusiastic convert to native build approach.

The autoblah stuff did get better over time, if the project came ready to work with newer autoblah it was possible to inform ./configure that you were building cross and it might even take care of most things. A lot of projects come with their own build approaches, eg webkit, sometimes they can be coerced into doing cross but each time it's a new different mountain to climb to understand exactly "how".

Native build eliminates all that and you can just do ./configure again because you're not having to trick anything. Combined with realizing you don't have to put up with cut-down anything any more like busybox ash vs actual bash, most of the special-case magic about "embedded" disappears and it's like working on a normal box with corresponding smoothing of development process and increase in dev speed.