[johnea]

I've used buildroot extensively, and an occasional yockto.

My impression in recent years is that these image cross build environments are just not as frequently needed as they were back in the day of their invention.

My most recent embedded linux environments were just embedded archlinux.

No need to cross build an image, just install and run the minimized linux environment right on the target.

Of course, a big part of the need for these cross-tools is that it seems most modern embedded linux developers are running windoze on their development workstations 8-/

[xyzzy_plugh]

Are you proposing compiling on the target? For a vast number of embedded systems that is not only impossible (insufficient disk and memory) but also incredibly slow.

At the end of the day you need some cross compilation just for board bring up.

If you're playing with some platform for which this has already been done, then sure, but that's not really the "normal" way of doing embedded.

[KingMachiavelli]

Embedded just means ARM 99% of the time and it's cheaper and easier to use native ARM servers (AWS has them cheap) than to make 100% of software cross compile. Some parts of the firmware might need to be cross compiled but those projects are designed to cross compile.

[okanat]

Your target build environment often differs significantly from your server environment, so you end up needing a different toolchain and all of the problems that come with cross-compilation anyway. The toolchain and ABI settings that produce small, battery or instruction cache efficient are usually not you want on servers.