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6.2 Canadian Cross Concepts

When building a Canadian Cross, there are at least two different systems involved: the system on which the tools are being built, and the system on which the tools will run.

The system on which the tools are being built is called the build system.

The system on which the tools will run is called the host system.

For example, if you are building a Solaris program on a GNU/Linux system, as in the previous section, the build system would be GNU/Linux, and the host system would be Solaris.

It is, of course, possible to build a cross compiler using a Canadian Cross (i.e., build a cross compiler using a cross compiler). In this case, the system for which the resulting cross compiler generates code is called the target system. (For a more complete discussion of host and target systems, see section 5.2 Host and Target).

An example of building a cross compiler using a Canadian Cross would be building a Windows cross MIPS ELF compiler on a GNU/Linux system. In this case the build system would be GNU/Linux, the host system would be Windows, and the target system would be MIPS ELF.

The name Canadian Cross comes from the case when the build, host, and target systems are all different. At the time that these issues were all being hashed out, Canada had three national political parties.



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