[LEDE-DEV] [dev][buildroot] Bypassing host tools to improve build times

[Ron Brash]

Hello all,

We have been exploring ways to improve the build times using a
pre-built host toolchain.  The standard way of using an external
toolchain through make menuconfig is not appropriate for us because it
is not working correctly (and we use the same .config for developers
too).  Unfortunately, the LEDE external toolchain feature still builds
the host components and the pathing is wrong (it breaks on MUSL for
us).

I admit that we are not on the latest trunk and we did a local fork,
but I'd like to know which script builds the host tools and what the
process is. I'd like to bypass the host tool compilation and provide
the tools as a binary package (zipped) so they can be retrieved by
Jenkins, and installed as part of the build setup for example.

We successfully got it to work sometimes, but there is some sort of
filelock/time stamping which determines whether to build the host
tools or not.  If it works (by magic), total compilation time goes
from ~37 minutes to ~17 :)

Thanks and I am sure this is of interest to others

Ron

-- 


Ron Brash
CTO  & Co-founder of Atlants Embedded Inc.
www.atlantsembedded.com
------------------------------------------------------------------

Cell +1 438 880 6441
Email  ron.brash at gmail.com
Blog www.pacificsimplicity.ca
LinkedIn ca.linkedin.com/in/ronbrash/