musl-cross-make-nightly

Nightly builds of upstream musl-cross-make toolchain for x86_64 and aarch64.

These are NOT my forked version - see below for the rationale behind this decision. The musl-cross-make upstream repository is used for these builds. My fork is put on hiatus for now, the reason for which is again explained in detail below.

Obtaining

The Releases page contains everything you need.

Build process details

They are built nightly using a GitHub action which runs on Ubuntu (currently 24.04, but this will be bumped to newer versions as time gos on). They are built natively, so the x86_64 toolchain is built on an x86_64 host, and the aarch64 toolchain is built on an aarch64 host.

They are bootstrapped three times for each build - starting from the host toolchain on Ubuntu. In the following order:

1. Use Ubuntu's host Glibc toolchain to compile first stage musl toolchain.
2. Use first stage musl toolchain to compile second stage musl toolchain.
3. Use second stage musl toolchain to compile final musl toolchain for release.

Why not the forked version

In the past, I forked musl-cross-make. The sole purpose of this fork was to provide more up-to-date versions of the toolchain components (including GCC and binutils). At this time upstream was still stuck on heavily outdated versions.

However, as of recently, the upstream project has seen more activity, and the developer(s) have added support for up-to-date components. As a result, these can now be used.

I did produce and release builds from my forked version, however this wasn't ideal, and was not automated. This project aims to fully automate the process, with nightly releases that run on GitHub actions.

The upstream project code itself has no functionality to "auto-detect" the newest available supported software version at runtime. As a result, I have written a script in this repository, called mcm-latest-hashes.sh, which, when either run from the musl-cross-make source tree, or has the source directory passed as an argument, scans each SHA1 checksum file under the hashes folder, and finds the one corresponding to the newest version of each package. It then produces that output in the formatting expected by config.mak. As a result, this script is automatically used by the build process of these toolchains.