freebsd stable - Jan 2004 - cross compiling freebsd for target intel platform other than pentium

greetings all,

my hopes for a good year and best wishes to all who congregate here
abouts.

i'm not sure if this is the best place to discuss this topic as i would
like some information about taking a -stable or most likely a -release
edition off of teh cd and installing it on teh host and then to bump it
up to -security edition while 'cross compiling' the whole box and dice
for the two production hosts (both of which are intel, supermicro
sourced motherboards off almost extreme vintage with 16 mb dram and a
couple of scsi hard drives hung off of an adaptec aha-1542b. both of
these machines have been running reliably for some 12 to 15 years and
as routers they do a superb job and i see no currently viable reason to
throw them out.

i have always been afraid of compilers (several severe mistakes in my
former life as a systems analyst that cost a lot of self-esteem credit
points that i am now getting over, thankfully). i know very littly
about c and gcc toolkits, i've been intimidated by teh whole
program/compiler mystique. some down to earth de-mystifying (especially
of teh way freebsd makes use of its make/makefile etc) would be muchly
appreciated as well.

i have tried to follow the documentation in teh handbook, i seem to
fail in the understaniding department (this happened to me all through
my school experience as well, i have difficulty with teh written
word

any words of wisdom, help and or guidance would be most appreciatively
accepted

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On January 8, 2004 01:14 pm, jonathan michaels wrote:
> i'm not sure if this is the best place to discuss this topic as i
> would like some information about taking a -stable or most likely a
> -release edition off of teh cd and installing it on teh host and then
> to bump it up to -security edition while 'cross compiling' the
whole
> box and dice for the two production hosts (both of which are intel,
> supermicro sourced motherboards off almost extreme vintage with 16 mb
> dram and a couple of scsi hard drives hung off of an adaptec
> aha-1542b. both of these machines have been running reliably for some
> 12 to 15 years and as routers they do a superb job and i see no
> currently viable reason to throw them out.
On the build box, edit /etc/make.conf and set CPUTYPE to the CPU type of 
the old boxes.  For instance, set this to 486 if the old boxes are 
486s, and so on.  You may need to copy the default file 
from /etc/defaults/make.conf to /etc/make.conf.  There are very nice 
comments in this file about the supported CPUTYPES.

Run the buildworld and buildkernel stages as per normal.

Next configure the build box as an NFS server and share out /usr/src 
and /usr/obj.

On the ancient boxes, use NFS to mount /usr/src and /usr/obj from the 
build box.  Run the installkernel and installworld stages as per 
normal.  You will now have an updated FreeBSD system, compiled 
specifically for whatever CPU is in the ancient boxes.

The comments in /etc/make.conf and /usr/src/README, /usr/src/UPDATING, 
and /usr/src/Makefile explain quite nicely how the buidlworld process 
works and how it uses the variables in /etc/make.conf to control 
everything.

Hope that helps.
-- 
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