Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture [LWN.net]

Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

Posted Mar 22, 2012 5:29 UTC (Thu) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183)
In reply to: Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture by jcm
Parent article: Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

> Fedora (and other distros) haven't traditionally *done* cross-compilation for everything. We would have to fix a /lot/ of assumptions from the get go.

In theory cross-compilation should be just as good as native, and helping to turn that into practice by creating heavy users would actually be lovely. Sadly this has become a lot harder (before it becomes easier one would hope) on Ubuntu 12.04 with their new multi-architecture system - at least many X11 development packages currently won't install for several architectures in parallel. At least in this case the fixes are not too hard, so I haven't yet given up hope for a fix before the actual release!

Back to Fedora though - if x86_64 is better at compiling and ARM at saving power, it seems to me that being able to build on x86_64 is a good example of what a cross-platform system is good for.

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Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

Posted Mar 22, 2012 6:50 UTC (Thu) by ttonino (subscriber, #4073) [Link]

Cross-platform building may make even more sense in the future as the gap between large and small systems continues to grow.

What if the distribution wants to run on a DSP based architecture with hard memory and storage limits?

In a sense, it is nearly always cross-compilation unless you compile Gentoo-style on the target box.

I'd say use the best tool for the box. Being able to cross-compile well also means that if ARM128 or PowerSparcWhatever would arrive, it could be used to do those x86-64 builds on.

So cross-compilation really solves tomorrows problems also if it means 'compile on the fastest system' and not 'compile on x86-64'.

Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

Posted Mar 23, 2012 20:11 UTC (Fri) by filipjoelsson (subscriber, #2622) [Link]

Gentoo'ers happily crosscompile too. I had a uclibc-box on 32-bit that used an amd64-box as distcc-slave - there's a lot of handy documentation on the concept.

I can see how the package/build system could get in your way if you're not constantly refining it (as Gentoo has a natural incentive to do). However, distcc goes out of its way to make these things easy, and I really do wonder if it has to be all that hard. I mean, the build can run on an ARM-box, which may share some of the build with an amd64-box by way of distcc. The way you'd achieve it is by putting the path with cc linked to distcc before the cc->gcc in the PATH. For builds that can't be distributed, just use the full path.