Various architecture support

Posted Aug 8, 2008 13:09 UTC (Fri) by michaelkjohnson (subscriber, #41438)
In reply to: Comments from an rPath engineer... by JohnNilsson
Parent article: Building custom appliance distributions with rBuilder

We have not built support for Marvell CPUs in rPath Linux, so this would be a significant undertaking. rPath Linux currently has support only for the x86 and x86_64 instruction sets. We have demonstrated cross-compile for other architectures from time to time, but maintaining cross-builds hasn't been a business focus. An amazing member of the rBuilder community, António Meireles, has been working on cross-builds for the LSB-specified architectures, which has been working out bugs in our cross-build capability. With bugfixes, the tools rPath provides could be used to do a cross-build for Marvell CPUs, but this would be a large undertaking requiring good knowledge of cross-building and rPath's tools; it would not be a cheap and easy way to replace the firmware on your qnap unit.

Coincidentally, rPath's sysadmin just in the past few days built himself a NAS device based on an rBuilder appliance, but it was a Norco NS-520 with an Intel CPU. This significantly reduced the amount of work required...