Cross building FreeBSD

[Christer Solskogen]

On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:38 PM, Roland Smith <rsmith at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 01:40:02PM +0100, Christer Solskogen wrote:
>> Hi!
>>
>> I've just installed FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE on my Mac Mini G4 (powerpc) -
>> Can I use my other, and much faster, machine(amd64) to compile world
>> and kernel to either populate /usr/obj or to generate base.txz, and
>> kernel.txz?
>
> It should be possible. See e.g. this article:
> http://bsdimp.blogspot.com/2006/09/cross-building-freebsd.html
>

Hm, that didn't help me much. I've already built both the kernel and
world on my amd64 machine.

> You do have to look up what the correct values of TARGET and TARGET_ARCH are
> on powerpc. IIRC, the G4 is 32-bit. So according to running 'make target' in
> /usr/src, it should be TARGET="powerpc" and TARGET_ARCH="powerpc".
>

There is no reason to add TARGET_ARCH when TARGET==TARGET_ARCH :)

> If you use the DESTDIR variable on the build command line, you can put the
> generated world and kernel in a separate directory, the contents of which you
> can then copy (e.g. with tar|nc or with rsync) to /usr/obj on the Mac Mini.
>

Well, that is the question. How to copy those file over. Files have
special chflags (for instance in /lib)

> Personally, 9.0 is the first release where I haven't bothered to build a
> custom kernel, because the GENERIC kernel seems to have everything I need
> built-in or available as a module. And neither have I bothered yet with
> building a custom world.
>

I agree. But there tend to be some erratas when the time comes. (And
there is no freebsd-update on ppc) And building on a PPC is a pain :)

-- 
chs,