linux cross-development (was: Re: /dev/null: No such file or directory)

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Wed, 20 Sep 2006, Alexander Leidinger wrote:

> Quoting Kris Kennaway <kris at obsecurity.org> (from Tue, 19 Sep 2006 21:41:27 
> -0400):
>
>> What happened to the linux_devtools port (which is supposed to take
>> care of this) - was it never updated to parity with linux_base?
>
> No. There are several reasons.
>
> The current devtools port is a mess and interfered with the old linux_base 
> port in undesirable ways (can't remember exactly how, I would have to have a 
> look at it again). Bringing it into shape would be a lot of work (nobody 
> stepped up so far, but I didn't asked for help for this because of the next 
> reason).
>
> To cross-develop you need a full system, the linux_base port is a lean and 
> mean system. The current linux_base port is designed to extend the FreeBSD 
> system and to provide a good user experience for those ports which are 
> available in the ports collection (and most probably for a lot of other 
> applications). We rely on the fallthrough to the native stuff in various 
> places (e.g. we have symlinks to the corresponding FreeBSD configs where it 
> applies). Doing a chroot into /compat/linux may work for some use cases, but 
> not for all (and you need to do a chroot for cross-compiling, else you may 
> pickup FreeBSD native stuff and get a lot of trouble) and it is not advised 
> to to a chroot into it (I should add a note about this to the port...).
>
> The linux_dist ports are full linux systems. You can chroot into them and you 
> already have all you need (and you can use the gentoo package-stuff to add 
> additional stuff).

Just curious, but why are the linux_dist ports trying to create devices in 
the dev directory?  shouldn't one be using devfs to mount devices?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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