pkg repository for ARM?

[Tim Kientzle]

On Aug 15, 2013, at 9:01 PM, Douglas Beattie wrote:

> Speaking of a package repository …
> 
> On Aug 15, 2013, at 8:21 PM, Tim Kientzle wrote:
>>> 
>>> On a related note: is there a pkg repository where one can just get compiled packages for ARM?
>> 
>> A few folks have partial ones but there's nothing official.
> 
> Well, that's what I'd like to see;  a set of directly-installable binary packages, based on release,
>  with a couple variants based on hardware core/code capability.
> 
> I kept wondering where or how that was going to happen, now that ARM is in the main kernel, …

It will be based on pkgng for certain.  So not much can happen
until pkgng is complete for i386 and amd64.  Work on that
is progressing.

Once that is done …

There is a promising hybrid approach for arm and mips
port builds that Stacy Son and Baptiste came up with:
This involves using Qemu as an image activator to
run arm binaries on an amd64 system.

Basically, the build thinks it is running native but the actual
compiler and other CPU-heavy work is running as cross-tools.
It's a really clever approach and the early test results
I heard at BSDCan back in May showed performance
comparable to doing native amd64 port builds (much
faster than using a farm of RPi's ;-).

Tim