The reminder

I just want to remind myself not to forget about cross compilation feature of the FreeBSD build system. When it may be tempting (from my personal habits of the past) to do native build on the same architecture as the target one, it may save time using the most performant hardware I have.

Let’s form some visualization of the numbers, which helps to compare it at a glance:

01 cross build numbers

Summary

It’s a pleasure to build everything (from perspective of my current projects) using the same laptop. And from the speed point of view, it’s about 17 times faster to build for AMD64 using Apple Silicon than Intel based machine I have. In addition, performance of QEMU emulation @ Apple Silicon is good enough for my current tasks when I need to run and test non-AArch64 OS instance built via cross-compilation.

 
 

Copyright © Igor Ostapenko
(handmade content)

👍 Fred Finster <fre**@t**o.com>

From: Fred Finster <fre**@t**o.com>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2025 23:37:52 -0700

thank you for this post, Igor  Glad to learn what Apple M1 silicon can
do in the cross compile area, or the QEMU emulation area.


Takes about 15-16 hours to buildkernel  about 24 hours to buildworld on
a Raspberry Pi 4B hardware with 8 gigabytes dram and a USB 3.0 to SSD
Ugreen metal case enclosing a M.2 NVME 1 terrabyte stick.

Nice Arm64 Machine

https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogspot.com  My GhostBSD source code kernel
compiled on a raspberry Pi 4B for Arm64 ( freebsd.org/where  RPI (3/4)
image)

http://ghostbsdarm64.hopto.org/packages   files to share with the internet


Fred Finster

Post a comment