cross platform building under emulation

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 08:02:59PM -0400, Dan Langille wrote:
> My usual practice when building world is to do it once on the fastest 
> box I have, then do installs via NFS mounts.  I need to do this for 
> FreeBSD 4.*, 5.*, 6.*, and -current.  My goal is to do all this with 
> just one box.  At first I thought of multi-booting the box.
> 
> Tonight at the OCUUG meeting <http://www.ocuug.on.ca>, someone 
> mentioned doing this with emulation.  After hearing that, multi-
> booting doesn't sound as good.
> 
> The box in question is an AMD 64 3000+ with 1GB of RAM.  The m/b is a 
> KV8E Deluxe, which gives me the option of onboard RAID-1 SATA.
> 
> What do you think of this idea?  What tools would you suggest?
> 
> The host enviroment will also be used as my main database server 
> running FreeBSD 6, most likely in AMD mode.

It should work, but might be a bit slow.

You could also consider using Kris's trick of running older userlands in
chroots on -current (or 6.x in your case) kernels like he does on the
ports cluster.  I think his BSDCan paper has the details on the bits you
need to replace to deal with kernel incompatabilities.  The nice that is
that you don't have any emulation in the way.  I think Peter Wemm said
they were also doing i386 chroots on amd64 kernels at Yahoo! so that may
deal with that issue.  At least until 7.0 comes you should be able to do
-current buildworld and buildkernel on 6.x machines so that won't be a
problem (if it is, scream since breaking that is bad :).

-- Brooks

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