Host Woof on ARM board

So far, the host system on which I have used Woof is an x86 computer. So when building a Puppy for an ARM board (such as the Raspberry Pi), I have specified host as "x86" and target as "arm" in Woof -- this is asked for in script 'merge2out'.

There are various problems with this "cross build", one of which is that certain operations (such as 'depmod') cannot be performed on the target environment, and they have to be deferred until first bootup of Puppy on the target board.
This is one of the factors that causes first-boot to be slow.

I have now added some armv6 executables needed to run Woof in an ARM environment, that is, host and target can both be "arm". Woof commit:
http://bkhome.org/fossil/woof2.cgi/info/985145716c

I haven't tried it yet. I will probably have a go at that tomorrow. It needs to be done with a USB hard drive, and probably the Raspberry Pi can handle it.

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Comments

qemu-arm
Username: jamesbond
If all you need to do is run depmod and a few other statically compiled utilities, you can use qemu-arm (usermode linux emulation) to run your arm-depmod from x86.

Tags: woof