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A few years ago I needed to add a new arch into Debian, it's a painful process, there are lots of arcane packages used to truly build and bootstrap the debian a

A few years ago I needed to add a new arch into Debian, it's a painful process, there are lots of arcane packages used to truly build and bootstrap the debian and they're all cross-dependent on each other. I wish there is a way like "linuxfromscratch" with clear steps to build Debian from source from scratch. Yes you can bootstrap a Debian root filesystem for a different arch, but that's after someone already did the work before you can do that, which again, is really complex and I have there are better ways to do it now(e.g. adding a new CPU family to Debian)

IntelMiner 4y ago
A lot of older Debian documentation has rotted away which is very sad for retro hobby stuff I wanted to rebuild Debian 2.2 against GCC 3.3 with its better support for SMP and SSE support for an old Pentium 3 workstation I've been playing with. Back then that kind of optimization could yield impressive performance benefits Unfortunately there's just no documentation for how to rebuild those ancient versions of Debian. The oldest I could find targeted the much newer Debian 4.0 "Etch" which came out in the mid 2000's
- djbusby 4y ago
  Gentoo still supports i486 architecture and it's totally ready to tweak build flags.
  - IntelMiner 4y ago
    Gentoo also has a ton of historical rot, something users have been trying to solve for a while https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712 https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712
thepostman0 4y ago
Might not be exactly what you're after: https://github.com/scottwilliambeasley/debian-from-scratch https://github.com/scottwilliambeasley/debian-from-scratch
pabs3 4y ago
Myself and some other folks recently wrote some new docs on how to add new arches to Debian. With multi-arch, cross-compilers in Debian and rebootstrap, it has gotten a lot less painful. There are still a ridiculous number of packages that need porting to every new arches though. Some of the needed changes should be moved into toolchains in my opinion. https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New
pabs3 4y ago
Which architecture were you working on adding?

IntelMiner 4y ago

A lot of older Debian documentation has rotted away which is very sad for retro hobby stuff I wanted to rebuild Debian 2.2 against GCC 3.3 with its better support for SMP and SSE support for an old Pentium 3 workstation I've been playing with. Back then that kind of optimization could yield impressive performance benefits Unfortunately there's just no documentation for how to rebuild those ancient versions of Debian. The oldest I could find targeted the much newer Debian 4.0 "Etch" which came out in the mid 2000's

djbusby 4y ago
Gentoo still supports i486 architecture and it's totally ready to tweak build flags.
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  Gentoo also has a ton of historical rot, something users have been trying to solve for a while https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712 https://bugs.gentoo.org/834712

thepostman0 4y ago

Might not be exactly what you're after: https://github.com/scottwilliambeasley/debian-from-scratch https://github.com/scottwilliambeasley/debian-from-scratch

pabs3 4y ago

Myself and some other folks recently wrote some new docs on how to add new arches to Debian. With multi-arch, cross-compilers in Debian and rebootstrap, it has gotten a lot less painful. There are still a ridiculous number of packages that need porting to every new arches though. Some of the needed changes should be moved into toolchains in my opinion. https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New

pabs3 4y ago

Which architecture were you working on adding?