NetBSD Crossbuild Hosted On Mac OS X 10.3

Dan writes "A few weeks ago Xavier Humbert succesfully compiled NetBSD-current on a MacOSX 10.3 with an i386 target. He has provided a summary of his crossbuild execution as well as his build script. But why bother crossbuilding ? Erik Berls's article explains the process of cross compilation on NetBSD. He says that NetBSD's crossbuild framework allows a host to build a version of NetBSD 1.6 or later regardless of the version of the host. Crossbuilding has several major benefits, if you have production servers, you can build the OS without needing to load down the machine that is actively surviving as a production host."

Re:*BSD is dying

[JDWTopGuy]

Well.... I'm losing karma fast here, but some times the "BSD is dead" joke is funny (in context), and same for "Soviet Russia" jokes.

On the rest I agree with you.

Re:Questionable Choice of Host

[cyb97]

What difference does it make which platform the author choose to build FROM, the big thing here is that he's able to build to several platforms.

Just to be nasty, you didn't really research your objections either did you? The first lines of the buildscript the author posted:
crossbuild.sh Complete script for building tools, kernel and userland from another machine
Tested :
NetBSD/i386 -> NetBSD/macppc
NetBSDS/macppc -> NetBSD/i386
MacOSX 10.3.1 -> NetBSD/i386

Notice the first line, it works using i386 too, so you could use i386 as a build system if you like.

The point is it can be done, and it's usually easier to port or fix an existing idea or feature than to implement a whole new one.

Re:Questionable Choice of Host

[Rubel]

It also means that instead of having a bunch of different autobuilder machines to maintain, you can just build every arch on one fast machine, with failure reports and fresh binaries ready for testers quickly and easily.

Re:Questionable Choice of Host

[cyb97]

Also saving you the cost of having an extra machine of every architechture in your serverpark to maintain.

It's cute, it's cool

[drinkypoo]

But if you have enough money to have "production servers" then you have enough money to have a build system of the proper architecture. One PC with vmware on it can handle all your x86 operating systems (in most cases anyway) including running several at the same time. Or, you can multiboot, but that's a pretty wanky solution I think.

Re:It's cute, it's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Some environments *need* a central build host (ours uses a large Sun box) to fulfill process requirements that their OEM system is buildable by non-development staff for production.

This functionality is most welcome and indeed very useful.