official packages for arm?

[Michael Tuexen]

On 06 Jul 2014, at 19:37, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> 
> On Jul 4, 2014, at 12:39 PM, Tim Kientzle <tim at kientzle.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On Jul 4, 2014, at 3:25 AM, Anton Shterenlikht <mexas at bris.ac.uk> wrote:
>> 
>>> Few silly questions, please don't shoot.
>>> 
>>> 1. Why are there no official arm packages?
>> 
>> Nathan answered this pretty completely, I think.
>> 
>>> 2. Are there any specific arm considerations when
>>> building ports? To do with build time? To do with
>>> processor capabilities?
>> 
>> Biggest issue is simply that key ports still
>> don't build on ARM.  For example, a default
>> build of git breaks because libgcrypt requires
>> GCC 4.7 port, which doesn't build on ARM.
I just tested this. libgcrypt builds on a RPi using clang.

Best regards
Michael
> 
> I have forward ports of our patches that could help this.
> 
>>> 3. As a guideline, if using external disk
>>> for building ports (e.g. usb flash media,
>>> usb hard disk, usb SSD) is the I/O speed
>>> important? Or is the bottleneck the processor speed?
>> 
>> My impression is that I/O is the major problem.
>> Especially for larger packages where the compiler
>> can end up swapping.
> 
> Yes. Why not do the qemu user mode emulation route that we do for mips?
> 
>>> 4. Of the three external media: (1) usb flash
>>> drive, (2) usb hard (moving parts) disk,
>>> (3) usb SSD, which is faster in broad terms.
>>> I understand YMMV.
>> 
>> I haven't experimented with different USB drives.
>> 
>>> 5. The default RPI-B kernel is very lean:
>>> http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/arm/conf/RPI-B?view=markup
>>> 
>>> Still there are things which (I think)
>>> I don't need, e.g. USB ethernet.
>>> Will I gain anything by removing USB ethernet
>>> from the kernel?
>> 
>> The on-board Ethernet for RPi is actually connected
>> through USB.  If you remove USB Ethernet, you have
>> removed Ethernet.
>> 
>> Removing what you don't need will free up more RAM,
>> which is always good.
> 
> Short of a dedicated building cluster of about 30 ARM machines, doing a full package build on ARM within a few days is a pipe-dream. We might be able to get it under a week with qemu.
> 
> Warner
>