by summers » Fri Jul 03, 2026 6:28 am
That would make some sense - especially for my armv5 NAS. That is very limited (Marvel kirkwood with 400 BogoMips) vs my Gen 12 i7 desk top (3000BogoMips - and something like 10 CPUs).
I'm usually only install cross compilers if I have to - my desk top already has too many on it. I've a cross compiler for Arm M boards, arm-none-eabi that comes direct from arch. My msp430 board have a cross compiler (msp430-elf) that IIRC is linked to newlibc. Then I have an armv7l-linux-musleabihf - a cryptic combo for a board out of china.
Hassle with full OS cross compilers is that C++ compiler need to be build against the C library you are using - that means you need at least the headers from that C library to even start the compilation. Thats gets tricky. I usually use the musl cross compiler script for doing an inital build with the right triplet. Then I recompile a modern gcc and glibc against the initial file structure for that target.
With Arch problem then need to the the package builder working against an arm target - I suspect that isn't too bad to do, but have never done it.
Think its only on the armv5 that I'm all that motivated, just creating a build environment and I've had to install something like 15 bits of software is /usr/local/bin - gcc (that I need for modern glibc) has been compiling for 3 or 4 days so far - I just leave it going in a detached screen.