Rethinking Fedora multilib support

Posted Jan 12, 2017 14:04 UTC (Thu) by foom (subscriber, #14868)
In reply to: Rethinking Fedora multilib support by eru
Parent article: Rethinking Fedora multilib support

On Debian on an x86-64 machine, you can enable the arm architecture in dpkg, and then install and run arm packages and binaries as if native (via qemu-user binfmt-misc support). No special casing needed -- it works just like installing i386 packages (except the programs run slower, of course).

Maybe not a super common use case, but, in some circumstances, very very useful.

The proper solution: create another sysroot

Posted Jan 13, 2017 12:14 UTC (Fri) by scottt (guest, #5028) [Link]

The Fedora solution to the "I want to build code for ARM" problem is to create another sysroot via the --installroot option of the packaging tools. (Plus passing it a different config file that specifies another CPU architecture ;) )

Being able to compile code for another CPU architecture running the exact same version of the distro as your development machine is not that useful. Being able to build for the distro version in production use or the in the hands of customers is.

The usefulness of the "separate sysroot" approach can be gleamed from the popularity of installing Docker containers of various popular distributions for development.