Hi Leho!
Thanks for many links, Jude Pereira's work totally missed my search results.

In fact I focused on playing with Qemu. First approach was to emulate whole
board (using qemu-system-arm) which works so far best of all, but is
painfully slow (but not more than other options). As for chrooted
environment, I used armv5tel stage3 tarballs available at my university
site:
http://ftp.fi.muni.cz/pub/linux/gentoo/releases/arm/autobuilds/current-stage3-armv5tel/-
it is one of official gentoo mirrors and stage3 tarball contains
everything necessary already compiled, including fully operational perl
5.12.3. I had no problems emerging any other packages, but as I said,
compilation takes ages.

Then I tried to move contents of my emulated folder to my ARM target machine
and on the machine try to chroot inside it. No problem with
compiling/emerging in chrooted environment directly on target machine, but
speed is maybe even lower.

The last approach I tried was using binfmt support to be able to run arm
binaries on my x64 box without the necessity to emulate whole board - I
hoped to have much better performance than when using qemu-system-arm.
Unfortunately it seems that qemu-arm does not support some system calls or
whatever. I untared stage3 on my x64 machine, chrooted into the folder and
tried running emerge - simple arm binaries were running fine, but emerge
ended with errors like "qemu: Unsupported syscall: 242"...

And last of all, I started documenting my approach on google sites:
https://sites.google.com/site/czernitko/cross-compilation/cross-compiling-perl-for-arm-architecture

Peter

2011/10/16 Leho Kraav <leho@kraav.com>

> i have managed to cross-compile a pretty complete stage3 for arm i believe
> with perl-5.10.1 from
> http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/embedded-cross.git;a=tree;f=dev-lang/perl
>
> overall the cross-compile experience was a nightmare, esp. re perl and
> python. many packages obscurely fail, but not enough for you to immediately
> give up. so it keeps sucking you back in and waste even more time. at the
> time i discovered that embedded-cross overlay had mostly done all the
> difficult work for me, but it seems it is no longer updated for recent
> stuff. i think guys in #gentoo-embedded told me it is a lot of effort to
> patch these large packages like perl and python to sanely cross-compile, and
> since i think their product thing didn't work out too well, they weren't
> going to sink any more time into maintaining for newer versions.
>
> but jude pereira i believe is doing something with arm stages at least
> semi-actively
> http://judepereira.com/blog/gentoo-linux-uclibc-stage3-2010-for-embedded/and it is definitely a lot of fun booting pretty much full blown gentoo on
> things like Nokia N8x0 internet tablets
> https://github.com/slonopotamus/n8x0-overlay
>
>