[bitbake-devel] Bitbake for native x86 project?

[Richard Purdie]

On Mon, 2013-10-14 at 09:28 -0400, Chris Morgan wrote:
> Ahh interesting. I was thinking that this kind of a short-circuit
> approach might make sense. Its good to hear that the concept isn't so
> crazy although I've literally found no information about anyone doing
> anything of the sort on the web.

I just sent out my notes/patch attempt at just short circuiting in gcc.
Its a bit messy and I found some issues I didn't expect. It would be
possible to do it with both gcc/libc I'd guess but its not something I'm
going to have any more time to try any time soon...

> I considered using the full blown x86/x86-64 targets but our build
> time right now using cmake and native tools is ~30 seconds with only a
> handful of MB of data to download.
> 
> Would using a sstate cache + a custom image target be able to get down
> to that kind of time? Today each developer is building on their
> desktop and from my own testing with angstrom it looks like the builds
> take nearly an hour and generate 30+GB of data. This is almost
> entirely why I've been hesitant to try to use the built-in x86/x86-64
> support. I love the idea of ensuring that everything matches exactly
> on each developer machine but the overhead is pretty crazy.

You can build a complete rootfs from sstate in about 4 minutes so I'd
suggest trying it and see. If you've just building a cmake app, it will
need to download and install a toolchain but it will just do that once
for any given build directory and I suspect you could make it work. 

Cheers,

Richard