Multiple Target Architectures

[Paul Diem]

A few years ago I built a system using uClibc on x86. I used buildroot 
to build the initial filesystem for my development machine. My target 
machines have always been x86 so I've been able build everything 
natively from within that environment.

I'm now looking at building the same system for MikroTik RouterBoards so 
I will need to cross compile to PPC and MIPS. I've having a hard time 
grasping how to do this though. Can I simply build gcc for the other 
architectures on my current development system and then build for the 
target? I know I can use buildroot to build a toolchain for each target 
architecture but how do I then use the resulting toolchain to build my 
existing system for the other architectures? It seems like I would have 
to run buildroot every time to generate a root filesystem for each 
target. That doesn't make sense though since I don't need to actually 
build a toolchain each time I rebuild the target system.

I know I'm missing something simple but I'm not sure what it is. 
Basically, I have a kernel, uClibc, busybox and some other packages that 
I want to be able to compile/cross-compile on an x86 host for x86, PPC 
and MIPS targets. What's the easiest/best way to do that?

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

-- 
Paul C Diem
PCDiem at FoxValley.net