Cross compiling FreeBSD

[Andrew Hotlab]

> Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:56:55 +0100
> From: ck-lists at cksoft.de
>
> On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, Andrew Hotlab wrote:
>
>> Sorry for my stupid question: I'll do the right thing if I'll build an i386 jail chroot/jail on the
>> amd64 builder host with the following commands? (grabbed from the FreeBSD Handbook)
>> # cd /usr/src
>> # make buildworld TARGET=i386
>> # make installworld TARGET=i386 DESTDIR=/path-to-jail
>> # cd etc/
>> # make distribution DESTDIR=/path-to-jail
>> # mount -t devfs devfs /path-to-jail/dev
>
> yes that should do it but I think you can skip the cd etc/ part.
> make distribution should work from /usr/src
>
>>> The hack to enable building in an i386 chroot is to set UNAME_m
>>> and UNAME_p to i386. I use following in the chroots .cshrc
>>> [...]
>>> This of course only works for the amd64, i386 combination.
>> Wonderful, I'll try this as soon as possible. Thank you!
>
> let us know if it works out.

I've build and exported RELENG_7_0 into an i386 jail running on amd64 hardware, then I
mounted sources and binaries on a RELENG_6_4/i386 machine and I have been able to
successfully upgrade without any trouble!! (only some warnings were displayed installing
the kernel, but that's a correct behaviour of the upgrade procedure, as pointed out in this
post: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2005-November/057963.html)

Thank you so much, Christian!

I'm thinking that it would be a great thing to prepare some materials explaining the methods
for maintaining a managed FreeBSD infrastructure in a corporate production environment. A
lot of sysadmins are afraid that they'll have to spend so much time in software management
tasks if they put FreeBSD in production for business applications, but it seems that only a little
of knowledge is required to manage such and environment obtaining a good TCO.

At present time I'm too much engaged with a lot of projects to be able to produce any docs,
but I'll surely advocate FreeBSD in such business scenarios!


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