Cross Compilation For Mkiv

[emptymonkey]

Hi all,

I've been playing around trying to get basic cross compilation set up on my x86_64 Linux laptop (Debian) to build binaries for my pineapple. My goal is to get a basic tool set installed on the pineapple's USB partition. (Vim for starters, maybe some other tools if I can get that going.) It also looks like the opkg list is fairly sparse. (Understadable since MIPS isn't quite as en vogue as ARM these days.)

Is anybody else playing with the pineapple as a multipurpose embedded device? What's the secret sauce?

I've been using the emdebbian toolchains for my recent builds (mips-linux-gnu-gcc). I can build simple programs (e.g. hello_world and "main(return(8))", etc). I build with the "mips-linux-gnu-gcc -msoft-float -mips32r2 -march=24kc -static -static-libgcc" invocation. The programs I build run perfectly well w/qemu-mips, but consume 90% cpu on the pineapple and never return. I do see the following dmesg entry after an attempt though:

[ 2070.710000] FPU emulator disabled, make sure your toolchainwas compiled with software floating point support (soft-float)

(I do use the -msoft-float option as a result, but suspect my toolchain libc was built assuming hardware floats.)

I've checked endianness and MIPS cpu version compatability. The only elf header difference I see between my binaries and the "busybox" binary that ships with the pineapple is the "ABI Version" entry. (I played w/the ABI options in gcc, but only hit toolchain libc compatability issues again.)

Do the dev's have an old SGI box around that they do their builds on?

Will debian-mips on a qemu emulator act as a reasonable build environment? (Will that even be useful w/out the Atheros firmware?)

Is my best bet to build a custom toolchains w/liberal application of the "-msoft-float" gcc MIPS option?

[ 0.000000] CPU revision is: 00019374 (MIPS 24Kc)

[ 0.000000] SoC: Atheros AR9330 rev 1

Thanks for any direction.