[Nix-dev] A few questions about ARM support and NixOS on a Chromebook

[Bjørn Forsman]

On 28 January 2015 at 08:42, Luke Clifton <ltclifton at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> I once used to think that full system cross compilation was the only way you
> should do things (I was an idealist). But it is a dead end. Unless you have
> thousands of hours to throw at the problem, it won't work.

Me too. I totally agree :-)

> Have you made any progress on this yourself?

Nope, not really. I'm finding the nixpkgs/nixos/stdenv bootstrap
process quite difficult to grap, so I've been putting it off...

All I have is this branch[1] that has some cross-compilation fixes
(borrowed from Buildroot[2]) for some basic packages (python, systemd,
...), as a step towards a "cross-compiled bootstrap image" that can be
loaded in QEMU to do further native compilation.

So far I've been thinking that we need to cross compile a fully
working (although minimal) nixos system for QEMU, but I'm not sure
this is strictly needed. Maybe we can bootstrap nix inside QEMU from a
tiny set of packages (gcc, libc, make)? But I'm not sure how to do it.
@nbp has some ideas:
https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/4963#issuecomment-64956636.

Best regards,
Bjørn Forsman

[1] https://github.com/bjornfor/nixpkgs/tree/cross-compile-fixes
[2] http://buildroot.uclibc.org/