Building FreeBSD on a linux FC11 box.

[Giorgos Keramidas]

On Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:22:51 +0100, Ulrich Spörlein <uqs at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 20.02.2010 at 13:03:14 -0800, R. Tyler Ballance wrote:
>> You might want to ask the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD guys:
>>     http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
>>
>> I bet they've got a good idea :)
>
> They are using the kernel only, though.
>
> Before you reinvent the wheel, take a look at NetBSD, they are known for
> their cross-compilation work.

It's non-trivial to set up a NetBSD-like cross-compilation environment,
but the bits you have to use are well-documented in the support of the
NetBSD source tree for 'tools'.  I've experimented a bit with some of
the work that's needed and it includes at least the following:

  * mtree -- This is used by parts of the build glue to set up
    build-time directories.

  * make -- Targetting *all* possible platforms with BSD make is
    probably not worth the effort, but adding a minimal configure.in
    script that can produce an 'fbmake' binary suitable for cross
    building FreeBSD is doable and not very hard.

With these two in place and a bit of Makefile target hacking it might be
possible to cross-build FreeBSD on e.g. Linux.  I don't have a Linux
machine anymore, but if someone starts doing this I can probably set one
up and test any patches.

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