Created attachment 2409 [details] Simple patch to demonstrate the proof of concept. At present SSTATE_CACHE cannot be located on NTFS (Windows) formatted drive. However, there does not seem to be a compelling reason for this and the fix could be relatively simple. What prevents the SSTATE_CACHE to be located on a NTFS is basically that all file names contain the character ':', which is not allowed for NTFS. I believe this character serves only as a delimiter. Replacing this delimiter with some other character (unlikely to be part of a file name) would/should do the trick. I experimented with this a bit, replacing ":" with "^" and located the SSTATE_CACHE to a CIF mounted Windows drive via SSTATE_DIR in local.conf. I was able to rebuild core-image-minimal. (I attached my patch, but it is only meant to be a proof of concept). (For some reason gcc played by different rules and kept showing up with ":", so I had to manually modify the string. All other packages behaved nicely.)
For interest http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=e5ee1b8c0d141e56ee67778c7b8af92de185dc01 was the last set of problems we had with filenames...
Created attachment 2410 [details] Patch to change filename separator also suitable for NTFS
Thanks Richard, this explains the gcc behaviour.
I was going to resolve this as "LATER" but we no longer have that option. This is something we might look at eventually but right now, there isn't a strong enough need for this.