Re: [Qemu-discuss] Very poor compilation performance in armhf chroot vs native

[Peter Maydell]

On Thu, 12 Sep 2019 at 10:01, Aboul Fad <address@hidden> wrote:
> Thank you for your reply. I am though stumped by that large of degradation 
> using that simple test and when I attempted to compile my actual project 
> (chromium) in the chroot, it was insanely slow.

Emulation isn't fast, generally speaking.

> Maybe this is off topic or meant for another mailing list: It seems my 
> approach for cross compiling using qemu-arm/chroot is wrong. I know I can 
> install a cross compile toolchain for arm target on the native OS and cross 
> compile there. Sadly, I have a chromium packaging code that checks the host 
> arch and based on that will or not cross-compile.
>
> Is there a way to take advantage of a hybrid approach:  compile on the native 
> hardware/OS using cross compile toolchain and link in chroot using 
> qemu-arm-static?

It is possible to just drop an x86 binary of a cross-compiler
(x86-to-arm) into your chroot as its 'gcc' binary,
and then you'll get native performance of the compiler
parts. (You can extend that to eg using a native /bin/sh
and similar binaries that get run a lot in compilation.)
The trick is that you do need to make sure your cross
compiler is configured to be equivalent to the compiler you're
replacing it with (eg that it looks for headers and libraries
in the same places, and so on).

If you have performant and reliable native arm hardware to do the
compilation on, this will almost always be the best option,
compared to trying to maintain a cross-compile setup. But
bear in mind that you want to compare performance of
native compilation *on your arm hardware* to QEMU performance,
not performance of native x86 compilation!

thanks
-- PMM