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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."
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.
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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.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"