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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

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IshKebab·

It's usually an enormous pain to set up. QEMU is probably the best option.

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T2 manages to do it

https://t2linux.com/

Yocto, which we use at work, manages it just fine to build a whole embedded Linux distro. So I don't see why Fedora couldn't make it work if they wanted. You could even scp over the test suites to run that on native systems if you wanted.

Yocto manages it thanks to the tireless effort of a community of people maintaining patches and unholy hacks for a ton of software to make it cross compilable. And they have nowhere near the amount of recipes that Fedora has.

This is true, but the hacks are mostly in the C and C++ recipes as I understand it. Something like Rust or especially Go or Zig is far easier to cross compile.

I personally found cross compiling Rust easy, as long as you don't have C dependencies. If you have C dependencies it becomes way harder.

This suggests that spending time to upstream cross compilation fixes would be worth it for everyone, and probably even in the C world, 20% of the packages need 80% of the effort.

I wonder if Fedora packages any C and C++ software?

I wonder how much of Fedora is written in Rust?

Maybe there are issues I'm not aware of but using dockcross has made cross-compilation quite easy in my experience.

https://github.com/dockcross/dockcross

How does it handle .so version differences and glibc version differences between the container and the target system?

Depends on the language, it's pretty trivial with Go.

Unless you use CGO. I've heard people using Zig (which has great cross compilation for the Zig language as well) to cross compile C with CGO though.

Yes, but they're compiling binutils.

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