1. Right now I do not have access to board. I think probably I can use
QEMU for simulating my hardware.
Yes, I expect so, but it won't be fast!
Does the kernel not have a VFP emulation mode that might make the
existing binaries work on your netbook, at least well enough for
bootstrapping purposes? Just a thought ... it might be better than QEMU?
2. Compiling each package individually will be a long process. I wonder
if Ubuntu has something like ALIP (ARM linux internet platform), which
can be readily used with scratchbox.
That would be nice, but I don't know of such a thing, and would it work
for builds in a custom environment?
Anyway, here's another top-tip: use distcc. This is a tool that gives
you a 'virtual' compiler. It does all the preprocessing and linking
using the native tools (in QEMU, in your case), but sends the
preprocessed source to a distcc server on another machine for the actual
compilation job.
The distcc server can be another ARM machine, but equally it can be a PC
with a suitable ARM cross compiler.
You can set up multiple distcc servers, each configured to run multiple
compile jobs, if you wish, and then run the build with
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=parallel=2 (or whatever) in the environment, and maybe
get a performance boost, depending how QEMU performs at the preprocessing.
Back in a former job, I used to have 6 SH-64 boards running package
builds via distcc, with the compilers running on 8 x86 build servers,
and I could rebuild the entire distro in one night. Of course, that was
only a small distro I put together myself - nothing on the scale of
Ubuntu, and the boards were faster than QEMU, probably.
Distcc is often mentioned in conjunction with ccache, but caching object
files isn't really very interesting if you only build each package once.
There might be some small advantage in speeding up repeated configure
tests, I suppose, but I suggest not bothering with it.
Hope that helps
Andrew
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