Re: NetBSD cross compile from Win32?

[cgd%sibyte.com@localhost (Chris G. Demetriou)]

gillham%ameritech.net@localhost (Andrew Gillham) writes:
> What would it take to build a NetBSD/xxxx cross compile environment
> on Windows?  I managed to get make running under cygwin, and config
> mostly worked, but I didn't have a lot of success trying to get gcc
> to configure.

I cross-develop NetBSD from Solaris and Linux, and am planning to
moving the support to Windows (Cygwin) eventually.

In terms of host tools, I've needed to make the following tools work:

        netbsd-config netbsd-install netbsd-lorder
        netbsd-make netbsd-mdsetimage netbsd-mkdep
        netbsd-mtree netbsd-rpcgen netbsd-tsort netbsd-yacc

I turn off a fair number of bits (lint, man pages, etc.) in the build,
since if you're doing embedded stuff usually you don't need those.  8-)

I've been meaning to try to do something useful with my mods to them
for a While.

The compilation tools are a mess: as far as I know you can't build
cross-tools out of the in tree 'dist' bits (even if you want to -- I
can't), and NetBSD support in the stock GNU tools is incomplete for
many, perhaps most, targets, because the NetBSD-related changes
haven't all been submitted back to the FSF maintainers.
To work around that, I have a set of make 'wrappers' that undef and
define a bunch of stuff to make the tools more NetBSD-like.  It's not
good enough though.

Another big sticking point is file systems.  For instance, if you want
a ramdisk image, you need to be able to _create_ that ramdisk image.
That's not necessarily going to be easy unless you have a NetBSD host
around -- there are no good tools to make a BSD FFS at this time.  If
people want to implement that type of thing, I'd love to see it -- and
would be glad to provide ideas for what should be in it.


chris