Cross-compiler fun

I needed to fix the elfutils build failure on ia64, but I didn't have access to such a machine. Fortunately Herbert Pötzl pointed out ski, an ia64 emulator for Linux.

Ski needs a custom guest kernel however, so I had to cross-compile that for ia64.

Setting up a cross-compiling toolchain on Debian is really easy nowadays; there's even a nice HOWTO describing the needed steps. For lazy people pre-built packages are available.

When compiling the toolchain yourself, note that you may need more/other library packages then listed in the HOWTO. This depends on the target architecture, e.g. for ia64 you will need libunwind7-dev, libatomic-ops-dev, and further libc6.1 instead of libc6. Otherwise gcc will complain about missing build-dependencies.

For ia64 I ran into a linker error when building gcc, however a patch from Bertl's cross-compiling corner solved that.

While doing all this I wrote some scripts to automate the process, so compiling a cross-toolchain (for any architecture) is now a matter of 5 minutes configuration and one ./driver run. Whee!