I have been considering the idea of adding gcc cross compilers to FATE. At first, I just want to try compiling some binaries to make sure the builds stay working; testing may come later via qemu or physical hardware.

There was once a time when I was reasonably competent at setting up cross compiling toolchains, when I was developing software for the Sega Dreamcast on a hobby basis (SH-4 and ARM toolchains). But I seem to have lost the skill somewhere along the line. Fundamentally, it involves configuring GNU binutils with an alternate –target than the default, native platform. The trouble is that it’s difficult to figure out exactly what the target is named. I recently tried to set up a toolchain for MIPS, just in case I should come into possession of a laptop with such a CPU. I couldn’t figure out if I needed a mips-elf target, or a mips32-elf target, or perhaps a mips32-linux-elf target. Nothing I tried worked.

Maybe I just don’t have the right targets. What would be some good, useful, cross-compiled targets to be building continuously with FATE? I suspect that, at a minimum, all of the targets for which FFmpeg has SIMD optimizations: Alpha, ARM, Blackfin, PS2-MIPS, SH-4, and Sparc.