[Clfs-dev] why there isn't any standard CLFS ARM Book?

[Michele Bucca]

Il giorno mar 4 dic 2018 alle ore 14:00 Andrew Bradford
<andrew at bradfordembedded.com> ha scritto:
>
> Hi Michele,
>
> On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 7:10 PM Michele Bucca <michele.bucca at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I was wondering why there wasn't a regular CLFS book for the ARM
> > architecture. Yes, we have clfs-embedded but we don't have a regular
> > CLFS Book. The only architectures supported are x86, x86_64, sparc,
> > mips, but not ARM. Why?
>
> There's no normal CLFS book for ARM because no one has taken the time
> to create it.  I assume that if you did add to the existing CLFS book
> to add the ARM architecture and send patches that someone would review
> the patches and apply them, although this may take some time as no
> CLFS book developers are very active these days.  But maybe your
> updates to add ARM to CLFS would spurn a new round of interest?  Who
> knows?
>

What do I need to learn in order to edit the book? I could be
interested in creating an ARM version or to help in my spare time

> If you're interested in it, give it a try.  In the worst case you'll
> learn something new.
>
> > Nowadays there are a lot of ARM based Single Board Computers like the
> > Raspberry Pi so I think that maybe the ARM community would benefit
> > from a book like this.
>
> Possibly.  Although I'd argue that CLFS itself isn't that popular for
> any of the architectures it supports in any of the book guises these
> days.  Enough "normal" distributions support ARM systems now that
> getting desktop/server operation isn't all that hard any more and for
> more embedded and resource constrained systems there are many
> semi/fully automated build systems which are widely used and have
> decently sized developer communities around them.
>

CLFS may not be the fastest and easiest choice if you want to build an
embedded system  that just works for your boar; it is an excellent
resource for those who want to learn how to do it on their own. It's
quite interesting to read. As a matter of fact I always have a browser
tab open on the CLFS Book and CLFS-EMBEDDED.

> > I know that there's a PiLFS project out there, but it's not a book,
> > rather a set of scripts that build LFS for the RPI. Still it's a
> > pretty useful resource.
> >
> > I'm having trouble building a Cross-compiler for ARMv7 (soft float)
> > using the latest packages used in LFS-8.3, glibc-2.28. I don't know if
> > you're interested in helping me with my problem. I Tried to build a
> > toolchain for ARMv5 (also soft float) and glibc builds fine if I
> > disable werrors. The toolchain can build several packages such as
> > busybox, binutils, make, GCC but it fails with *tar*.
>
> For your failing package builds, have you looked at the patches which
> are used to build those packages in Debian?
> Debian supports ARM and everything builds for them so it can be a good
> place to find patches, if any are needed.
>

Fortunately I've fixed that issue. It was my fault. I did not create a
full limits.h header as stated here:
http://linuxfromscratch.org/lfs/view/stable/chapter05/gcc-pass2.html

> > If I had a book maybe it would be easier for me to build a working
> > toolchain without this kind of issues. Let me guess, ARM processors
> > have too many differences between them and it is difficult to build a
> > book that works for all of them, right? Let me know what you think. I
> > really like the ARM architecture and it would be a shame for me to
> > abandon it.
>
> If you need a toolchain that works and want to rule that part out, why
> not start by using an off the shelf toolchain and try to bootstrap
> yourself?
> For example, start with Debian's cross toolchains to build your base
> system up enough that it can host its own toolchain and then go from
> there.  Or if you're not interested in a glibc system, take one of the
> off the shelf alternative libc toolchain tools (musl-cross works well:
> https://github.com/GregorR/musl-cross) and start with that.
>
That is also a nice tip that I should consider, thanks a lot.

Cheers
Michele

> Thanks,
> Andrew
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