[arch-ports] Advice on bootstrapping Arch onto a new architecture?

[Sijie Bu]

(This message was originally posted on arch-general and I was redirected by a member to this list.)

Hello,

I am about to start working as an intern at CIP United, a company focusing on MIPS chips, and I will be bootstrapping Arch Linux onto the MIPS64r6 architecture, in a fashion similar to Arch Linux ARM.

I have checked the Arch Linux MIPS project, but it seems to be inactive for years now. I have checked ArchWiki's DeveloperWiki section, but it seems to lack guidelines or suggestions on bootstrapping Arch onto a new architecture. Therefore I have a few questions:
- Intuitively, I think I should cross-compile the packages of the "core" section (sans a few x64-specific packages) and build a bootable rootfs, but I was having some trouble finding how should I set makepkg to cross-compile. Do I just set up an Arch developer environment as usual, but substitute the toolchain with the cross ones?
- Does adding a new architecture require modifications to the pacman source code? Or pacman itself should support new architectures? I have also tried looking at pacman source code, and it seems to not have hard-coded list of architectures, but I am not 100% sure about this (if I'll have to modify the source code of pacman, I will be emailing the pacman-dev mailing list regarding their policies on patches etc.).

Thank you for your time and have a nice day.
Sincerely