drawbacks of crosstool-ng on cygwin and mac

Cygwin

Cygwin as host

Cygwin should be a functional host by now. There still are quirks to work around (mostly due to how Cygwin wraps the Win32 API to provide POSIX semantics), but the core of crosstool-NG is playing nicely now.

One major drawback of running under Cygwin is the performance impact, notably when dealing with files, but not only:

open(2), read(2), opendir(2) and readdir(2) are really slow
the directory under which the build is done must be mounted with the -o managed option, or the build will fail, due to issues with case sensitivity
there seem to be a limitation in file name size, that appears to be shorter than under other real POSIX systems, at least when compared to Linux
fork(2) is slow as hell
Note: with the recently released Cygwin 1.7 series, mount no longer supports -o managed. Look at the Cygwin FAQ.

Cygwin as target

This will need newlib being supported first: Cygwin is built around newlib, not glibc nor uClibc, so crosstool-NG will have to be able to build newlib-based toolchains prior to be able to target cygwin.

Other systems

MacOS X

MacOS X as a build system seems to have issues with the configurator: you must pass KBUILD_NO_NLS=1 on the make command line, as to not configure the internationalisation. Thanks go to Allan Clark for the patch.

Also, some of the tools there are not up-to-date with the one required by crosstool-NG:

the bash version there (2.05b) doesn't support set -E. Only starting with 3.0 does bash support set -E. I have no fix yet.
the sed version does not understand some flags (-r, for extended regular expressions, is not accepted). So the install fails.
the date command does accept nanoseconds format %N.
seems also that bash is limited to doing 32-bit maths, when I need 64-bit maths (cause of nanoseconds).