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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."

3 of 33 comments (clear)

  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. 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.'"
  3. 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.