I need to test some code on a big-endian system, and it feels like severe overkill to use an entire linux distro to run one executable on a big-endian platform. I have been working on the eudyptula challenge, so I am familiar with the idea of just running the raw linux kernel, loading bash, and quickly compiling my project (although I think quickly compiling is an oxymoron) then running it. My issue is that I can't seem to successfully cross-compile linux 4.7 on my arch linux machine to successfully run it on a big-endian emulator (using qemu). I installed the arm-linux-gnueabihf-* packages and tried make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabihf- defconfig which seemed to successfully build the kernel, but when I tried 'running' it with qemu-system-arm -machine raspi2 -kernel ./arch/arm/boot/zImage it just showed a black screen. Any idea how to successfully run a basic linux installation without any distribution to quickly test big-endian code?
Cross-compile base Linux for Big-Endian system
linux;linux kernel;cross compilation