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This FAQ is designed to help people understand the unique design and intent of the Cross Linux from Scratch project. Any questions or inquiries for improvements/suggestions/bugs please feel free to chat in #clfs on irc.freenode.net. And now for the FAQ.

Q: What is CLFS (Cross Linux from Scratch)?

A: CLFS started off as an extension to the Linux from Scratch project to support the recent 64bit processors. Then it moved to encompass other architectures like MIPS, ALPHA, SPARC. To date the project includes support for most known 32-bit AND 64-bit processors.

Q: All this talk about a toolchain. What exactly IS a toolchain?

A: The toolchain is the foundation of your building environment. It consists of kernel headers, C library (either glibc or uclibc), binutils (linker suite) and gcc (compiler suite). Any changes of this set of tools might result in an unstable program being built or inability to compile a program. It should also be noted that ANY CHANGES IN THE C LIBRARY WILL MOST LIKELY BREAK EVERY PROGRAM ON YOUR SYSTEM. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Q: The variables used (CFLAGS, CLFS_HOST, etc). What are those and why must they be set?

A: The variables being set like CLFS_HOST and CLFS_TARGET are very important because they are used to tell the building scripts (usually configure) how to setup the Makefiles for compiling.

If there are any other questions that people have feel free to ask in irc channel or mailing lists.