26.4.2 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 example, the build system would be GNU/Linux, and the host system would be Solaris.

Note that we already discussed the host system above; see 26.1 Host and Target. 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 the target system.

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.