getting Erlang to run on an embedded powerpc 860

[matthias@REDACTED]

Hi,

I now have Erlang running on an embedded powerpc board, but the way I
got it running seems "somewhat unsatisfying", maybe people here have
some better ideas.

The board:
    Motorola PPC860 CPU
    Runs a cut-down linux
    Does *not* have a native development environment, e.g. no
      'make', no 'perl', no gcc.

The PPC860 is "almost" compatible with the PowerPC CPUs found in
macintosh machines. In practice, binaries compiled for, e.g. a PPC603
will crash on the 860. So I have to cross compile.

Approach #1: Try to understand autoconf. Modify the configure
	 stuff so that it makes makefiles suitable for cross
	 compilation. After a frustrating day fighting with this
	 I decided to leave playing with autoconf for braver people.

Approach #2: Run configure on my x86 machine, and then
	 let some scripts run through the source tree and 
	 'fix' the Makefiles.

In more detail:

   ./configure
   find . -name Makefile -exec mung \{\} \;
   vi make/i686-pc-linux-gnu/otp.mk
   vi erts/emulator/i686-pc-linux-gnu/Makefile
   make noboot
   fiddle with some -L paths which caused make to fail
   make noboot
   copy over the library .beams from my x86 version
   done

'mung' is a script which runs the makefiles through a few sed filters
which change all occurences of CC = gcc to CC = powerpc-linux-gcc and
do similar things to LD, AR, RANLIB and so on.

This approach seems unsatisfying for two reasons. Firstly 'configure'
might have set some CPU-dependent flag, e.g. x86 is little endian and
PPC is big endian. Since the resulting Erlang "seems to work ok" on
the 860 I'll just assume that's not the case. Secondly it feels like a
gigantic hack, though seeing that Patrik's approach to compiling for
VxWorks isn't much more sophisticated made me feel better ;-)

Comments? Suggestions?

Matthias