Monday, December 05, 2016

NetBSD cross compilation is a marvel

While trying to get a patched variant of NetBSD 7.0.2 to run on my Raspberry Pi 3 I had to build NetBSD many times.

And it was pretty amazing how this all worked.

You have a single entry point: ./build.sh And it does everything! It builds the kernel, the userland apps up to the install image you write on the microSD card.

Of course, having a top-level script that does everything is nothing new, it's basically the second question in the Joel Test.

What is amazing is the cross-compilation.

You have an x64 machine and build.sh will happily create the install image for any supported platform.

The Raspberry Pi image is just:

./build.sh -m evbarm -a earmv7hf -u -U release

then you look into the release dir, find arm7.img.gz and you are ready to go.

I ran the builds on a NetBSD virtual machine, but apparently build.sh will happily run with some small preparation even on Linux or macOS.

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