[clue] Buying pi.

[marcus hall]

On Tue, Feb 26, 2013 at 10:46:06AM -0700, Jim Ockers wrote:
> Hi Dave,
> 
> I've done a lot of work on ARM (via OpenWRT build kit) and I was 
> wondering if you can build the distro under the ARM environment (on the 
> Pi itself) or if you have to cross compile on another system then copy 
> the files?
> 
> I thought many times how it would have been convenient if I could have 
> built packages under a fully operational ARM dev environment, just like 
> we do for x86.  Basically I'm wondering if there is a *devel set of 
> packages including native gcc for the Pi.  Maybe gcc can't run without a 
> MMU or something?  I never looked into why it didn't exist.
> 
> Jim

I don't think that there is a fundimental reason that you can't do native
development on the Pi, but working on a modern x86 system is going to be
several orders of magnitude faster than working on the Pi.  Compilers and
linkers want lots of memory to hold AST trees and symbol tables, so they
are likely to drive the Pi into swapping, which is a failure if it doesn't
have a swap device defined, and a real performance hit if it does.

Hmm.. considering whether I imagine that it would take 10^4 or 10^5 more
time...  Maybe more..

marcus hall
marcus at tuells.org