[Buildroot] [PATCH 1/1] buildroot-test: enable toolchains based on hostarch

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

On Wed, 30 Mar 2016 19:41:00 -0500, Matthew Weber wrote:

> I guess I don't completely follow why "any arch" for the internals, as
> that host arch entry should represent the arch of the system the
> toolchain was built on, correct?  Or are you saying that because an
> internal normally would be built from scratch it would work on any
> arch? 

Precisely: internal toolchain configurations are configurations where
the toolchain is built by Buildroot. Since it's built from scratch, the
architecture of the machine on which we're running the build doesn't
matter.

> If so, maybe we need a test that checks the gcc executable for
> arch rather then using this host arch entry?

The problem is that we need to know *before* choosing the toolchain
configuration whether it will work or not on your machine. Otherwise,
you'll pick up one of the toolchain configuration, generate a random
set of packages, and then start the build. The build will start by
downloading the external toolchain, will attempt to run the external
toolchain gcc, which will fail and abort the build. Of course, at this
point, we could detect if the failure is caused by the gcc not being
for the right architecture, and instead of categorizing this failure as
a build failure, simply move on and generate another configuration. But:

 1/ This seems really wasteful.

 2/ It is not that trivial to distinguish build failures caused by the
    compiler not being built for the right architecture from other
    failures.

> I do have a bug as we would still want to allow the i386 toolchains to
> execute on a x86_64 system.  Currently it excludes those with this
> update.

Correct. i386 toolchains should be considered for x86_64 systems.

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com