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Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:17:41 +0200
From: Timo Teras <timo.teras@iki.fi>
To: Nathan Angelacos <nangel@alpinelinux.org>
Cc: Alpine Developers <alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org>
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] Request for pointers in porting alpine linux
Message-ID: <20120218101741.2106834d@vostro>
In-Reply-To: <4F3EE25B.8000308@alpinelinux.org>
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Hi,

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 18:27:23 -0500 Nathan Angelacos
<nangel@alpinelinux.org> wrote:

> Looks like I'll be doing more work on ARM processors in the near
> future.
> 
> Anyone have any pointers wrt porting Alpine to a new architecture? 
> Anything at all would be helpful.

When we did the NPTL-update the steps were roughly:
 1. Build cross compiler tool chain
   - I used crosstool-NG [crosstool-ng.org]; it is also apk addable,
     but needs an update
 2. Using the cross compiler, build initial minimum build environment
   - I believe ncopa made a list of what to build and which order
     (basically need kernel, perl, openssl, apk-tools and alpine-sdk
     with their dependencies)
   - abuild called to build, with CROSS set to cross compiler prefix
   - abuild called so that dependencies are ignored, and no packages
     generated; everything was installed to same target dir
 3. Now we have minimum bootstrap environment for target; either boot
    on target machine, or QEMU
   - repeat step 2. but this time generate packages
 4. Now you have initial packages for install that you can use further;
    these can be used to setup the buildozer for the architecture

I afraid this is not very automated process. While the APKBUILDs do
contain $CROSS suppport in various places, it could be better. And
abuild should have better commands for it. Also the list of what to
build and in which order should be in git somewhere. Ncopa also had
some scripts for step 2.

Might be even nice to keep the known-to-work initial crosstool-NG
configurations, just in case.

For ARM, I think it might be an idea to setup the build environment
inside QEMU since it'd likely be way faster, and get a lot more RAM
than from any native, reasonable priced ARM box.

Cheers,
  Timo


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