The other day I packaged up a build of cross-compile tools for i686 bare images using the instructions from the OSDev wiki for making a cross-compiler suitable for building bootable images and kernels. I had started fooling around with dockcross to do the builds, but some of the OSDev samples explicitly complain if you use a compiler that can be used to build for a Linux target. So I just packaged up something of my own and made a super simple wrapper script to make it less cumbersome to run.

Today I added a few tools so that it’ll easily build a workable image for the Meaty Skeleton sample with very little setup required. Here’s how to do it from a clean system (with Docker already installed):

I like the way it worked out. At first the Docker image was huge cause I did the tool download, build and cleanup as different steps. Now there’s a big and kinda ugly stage in the Dockerfile to download, build, install, and then clean up all as one big chunk. But the result is a relatively trim container that makes the startup a lot simpler.