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NetBSD Crossbuild Hosted On Mac OS X 10.3

Posted by timothy on from the swapping-about dept.

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."

1 of 37 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Questionable Choice of Host by cyb97 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.