guix deploy with cross compile

guix deploy with cross compile

[Matthew Wolff]

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Hello Guix developers,

Does guix deploy support cross compilation targets (as opposed to qemu
emulation with binfmt_misc)?

If not, would you consider adding support for that? With some guidance on
where to find the appropriate locations to modify in the codebase, I could
try to help out.

Here is my use case:
I have a handful of ARM single-board computers, and it would be convenient
to manage them through guix deploy. However, I only have an x86-64
workstation. The ARM boards are too low-powered for them to update
themselves (they sometimes run out of memory trying to compute
derivations), but the workstation using guix-deploy is unbearably slow
since it must use emulation. If it could instead cross compile when
deploying that would speed things up tremendously.

I suppose this use case could alternatively be served by having the boards
offload to the workstation, but that doesn't support cross compilation
either, right? I'd be in the same situation with very slow emulated builds
on the workstation.

Thanks,
Matthew

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