Several months ago I mentioned that Red Hat had a cross build environment which generates embedded root filesystems using Fedora source rpms. Today we are making it available. It is rough around the edges, but functional. If people express an interest in it we will see about putting it on Fedora hosted and have future development take place there. All the bits are on the GES FTP server:

ftp://ftp.ges.redhat.com/private/releng/arm-linux-beta

The cross build environment is called 'rpmbuildroot'. This is the package you are looking for. Jump into the docs directory for information on how to get started (skip the top level README).

For the last while the focus has been on the Nokia N770, so you will find that is what the environment is configured for. There are also some mips and am33 patches in there (rpmbuildroot is target arch independent), but they are unlikely to be valid for any modern Fedora version.

The FTP server also hosts the cross compiler toolchain that rpmbuildroot is known to work with. The binary rpm was built on RHEL5, but should work on any modern Fedora release.

Current rpmbuildroot caveats:

1. x86_64 support is not included. It only runs on i686 hosts. This may or may not resolve with setarch. Certainly it won't take much work to get running on x86_64.

2. The package list is currently against Fedora 7. Moving to 8 or rawhide is relatively straightforward, but takes a little time for each package update.

3. The latest version of mock does not work with rpmbuildroot. We include a version that does work.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I didn't do the engineering work for this, but as a test hamster, have been able to run 'make' successfully so I might be able to answer them.

Have fun,