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Building NetBSD Under Cygwin on Windows XP, PPC

Posted by timothy on from the even-more-ubiquity dept.

Dan writes "John Gordon has completed a set of changes to the NetBSD build infrastructure that allows him to build at least two architectures (i386 and ibmnws platform, a PowerPC box) under Cygwin/Windows XP Home Edition and PowerPC. He has made a CVS patch for Cygwin, and provides instructions on the required configuration of Cygwin to avoid a problem with directory name clashes due to the case insensitive file system on Windows."

33 comments

  1. Why? by Peapod · · Score: 0

    Why would you want to? I'm not sure I understand.

    -Peapod

    1. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      Think like an embedded systems company that wants to take advantage of NetBSD's excellent support for platforms like Hitachi Super-H, StrongArm, MIPS, and embedded PowerPC, but are themselves a Windows shop, and you'll see why this is a win...

      Remember that there are a lot of prototyping and testing tools out there that are currently windows-only, and it's thus a lot easier to sell some of these shops on OSS as a target OS than as a desktop platform...

      This may well change, but we aren't there yet...

    2. Re:Why? by vesamies · · Score: 2, Interesting

      One reason I can think of is that, if you have fast Windows XP box and some weird machine running NetBSD which is not so fast, then using the latest and greatest sometimes requires compiling... Another reason is that in principle NetBSD should compile on any POSIX platform, I was not enough brave to dig into details why this was not possible earlier...

    3. Re:Why? by wolrahnaes · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Next time you want to ask that question, remember: This is slashdot. We do things because we can. In this case, as some of the other replies have pointed out, there are some practical uses. One that hasn't been pointed out is building under cygwin to run under bochs. Just because you wouldn't do it doesn't mean someone else can't.

      --
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    4. Re:Why? by matts.nu · · Score: 1

      if you have fast Windows XP box...

      I have a VM on my fast XP gaming machine just for this reason, to compile stuff for my BSD server.

  2. Re:Call me. by override11 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Can't call, its busy!
    Will try again later... Ohhh, BSD's.... I'm lonely too!!!

    --
    No I didnt spell check this post...
  3. XP on PowerPC? by marind · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    "under Cygwin/Windows XP Home Edition and PowerPC."
    This makes no sense. Windows XP ist an OS, PowerPC a processor. It should say: "You can build NetBSD for the i386 or a certain PowerPC Plattform under Windows XP on i386."

  4. whats the point? by dizzy+tunez · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    What`s the point of /building/ NetBSD on WinXP/cygwin? Its not funny to build systems, the fun is to /install/ them. What the hell should i do with a lot of NetBSD binaries on my Windows system, i cant use netbsd on a fat/ntfs anyways can i?
    Is compiling the best use of our CPU?
    seti@home anyone?

    --
    "If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
    Spider Jerusalem
    1. Re:whats the point? by Jellybob · · Score: 1

      seti@home, also a great use of your Windows box.

      How about helping to cure cancer first?

  5. Speaking as an XP user by RLiegh · · Score: 1

    I think this could be neat if:

    A)if this could be used to set up, create and manipulate ufs/ffs partitions on your computer. (I know, highly unlikely)

    B)If the next step was to create windows binaries of the NetBSD system (to replace their GNU counterparts)

    Hell, it's neat regardless! Next, we need to have the guys at LFS add cygwin compatibility so I can truly build a linux from scratch!

    1. Re:Speaking as an XP user by ocelotbob · · Score: 1
      Creating *BSD binaries is already possible, even without this patch through tools such as pmake, or even building them without the use of a makefile. My system is a hybrid of BSD and GNU - the BSD utilities are usually smaller and faster, so I've installed the tools that provide the functionality I need yet are much quicker. Yeah, maintenence is a bit harder, but I'm tough enough and I'm geek enough to do it.

      As far as accessing UFS/FFS partitions goes, this patch isn't needed there. What you need to find out is if VMWare/Bochs can access raw disks from inside of windows. If it's possible, you'd need to be admin to run either VM system, but this patch isn't part of that process.

      --

      Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses

    2. Re:Speaking as an XP user by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      You can create populated ffs file-system images on NetBSD using my /usr/sbin/makefs, even as a non-root user (i.e, create a file system with setuid files, devices, etc, as contents). In fact, this is how all of the ffs file system images for the install media (miniroots, ffs-inkernel-ramdisks, etc) were created for the NetBSD 1.6 (and later) releases.

      I know that this is not the same thing as *accessing* pre-existing ffs file systems directly on Windows NT/2000/XP, but it does cater for at least one reason why people would want to do that in a cross-build environment.

      (mmm, not needing root privileges or writable source to cross-build an entire NetBSD release.)

      Luke.
      NetBSD cross-build hacker.

  6. Re:*BSD IS DYING by cheesekeeper · · Score: 1
    THE most popular *nix on the planet is a *BSD.

    OS X has Darwin underneath, and Darwin is a relative of FreeBSD. And guess who is the largest distributer of *nix in the world? Apple. Their market share may even be growing (although slowly). And if you're concerned about servers, keep in mind that every time an OS X user checks the "Personal Web Sharing" box in their preference panel, another *BSD box running Apache goes live for the world.

    I know it's not what you meant, but just keep in mind that *BSD is here to stay.

    --

    Best read in good ol' Monaco 9 point.

  7. Virtual PC? Gentoo Linux PPC! by axxackall · · Score: 1
    He forgot to mention that on his PPC with OSX he was running Virtual PC, which was running Windows XP, which was running Cygwin, which was building NetBSD. Or man, some people are doing very crazy things to their computers!

    I wonder, why not run just Gentoo Linux PPC on that box? Just run it. No building of NetBSD even will be required - you will be happy emergeing Gentoo packages already!

    --

    Less is more !
    1. Re:Virtual PC? Gentoo Linux PPC! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      except gentoo is as stable as windows.

    2. Re:Virtual PC? Gentoo Linux PPC! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Gentoo's only unstable if you do not understand that -O9 -fomit-everything-possible will make it unstable.

    3. Re:Virtual PC? Gentoo Linux PPC! by Bert64 · · Score: 1

      I would imagine NetBSD would build just fine under OSX natively anyway!

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  8. Why? Distcc by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I do distributed builds for the Linux target using distcc across many machines including cygwin boxes with x86 Linux cross compilers. Why? Because the Windows boxes we have are generally faster than the Linux boxes we have and are idle most of the time anyway.

  9. You know what really sucks about windows? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Even with cygwin you cannot create or properly handle a file with a reserved name, such as aux, nul, com1, con, et cetera. So when you try to extract the "aux" dir, or files like aux.h or aux.c which are fairly commonly used names in source trees apparently, tar chokes and fails to extract the file. In order to compile some software I've had to extract files like aux.h as winaux.h (arbitrary filename I chose) and then edit makefiles, cfiles which include it, etc.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re:You know what really sucks about windows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Microsoft's "Services for Unix" (SFU) 3.0 solves this issue.

    2. Re:You know what really sucks about windows? by Mistah+Blue · · Score: 1

      It works on both W2K Pro and WinXP Pro. My source is the MS website for SFU (sorry don't have link handy).

  10. Uh, MS "Services for UNIX 3.0" ... demo available by UNIBLAB_PowerPC · · Score: 1

    I was about to mention SFU3 and noticed that an AC beat me to the punch -- but only because it was an insert in this month's Sysadmin Magazine (which totally threw me for a loop -- MS bought the centerfold spread and paid for a demo CD -- I sure hope they ended up picking up the entire tab for this month's production costs). One thing I noticed on the SFU3 CD jacket -- and bear with me because didn't see any fine print and haven't actually looked at the CDs contents yet -- is that it appears that MS is selling SFU3 as an add-on component for Windows. I'm curious if it requires Win2K Server (any of the family) or will also install on Win2K Pro and WinXP Pro. Does anyone know what the deal is, because this should solve his file name problem? That is, if the fine print doesn't say otherwise ... and yeah, I could go google the answer, but why bother, because I probably won't buy this when I can do it another way for free.

    --


    Even superheroes once were losers