[Nix-dev] Cross-building configuration.nix for ARM (Sheevaplug)

[Bjørn Forsman]

2011/11/21 Lluís Batlle i Rossell <viric at viric.name>:
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 06:24:15PM +0100, Bjørn Forsman wrote:
>> 2011/11/21 Lluís Batlle i Rossell <viric at viric.name>:
>> > On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 11:50:25AM +0100, Rickard Nilsson wrote:
>> >> Hi,
>> >>
>> >> How should I do to cross-build my configuration.nix for the SheevaPlug? Is
>> >> it possible? I have read about cross-building in the wiki, but it talks
>> >> about cross-building individual packages. How can I cross-build a complete
>> >> system?
>> >
>> > We do not have that ready now. The nixos expressions are all meant for native
>> > building.
>>
>> I dream of combining Aboriginal Linux[1] and nixos. Aboriginal
>> provides a minimal native build environment (gcc, make...) for a bunch
>> of architectures. All that's needed then is to have a (native) distro
>> build system that can bootstrap itself. (Nixos is the only distro I
>> know of that seem to care about this kind of bootstrapping.)
>>
>
> In theory (Michael claims it does not work for him), we can cross-build make,
> gcc, nix, into a bootable system. Then we can build bootstrap tools there.
>
> This is how I built the bootstrap-tools for armv5tel and mips n32, and then used
> nixos there, iirc.

I read http://vicerveza.homeunix.net/~viric/cgi-bin/nanonixos/doc/trunk/doc/usage.wiki.

- Does nanonixos bootstrapping depend on a nixos host?
- Is nix very slow on your embedded system? On my x86 QEMU test system
I find nix/nixos to be very slow :-(

BTW: The Aboriginal Linux creator is also working on boostrapping
various distros (LFS, gentoo, funtoo, fedora, debian, ...), but I
guess this isn't the list to discuss general distro bootstrapping :-)

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman