I have a ROS 2 package from which I can build a .deb for either my native platform, or for another platform by relying on Docker and QEMU. I would like to do a true cross-compile of this package, without relying on QEMU, since the compilation time of this package is a bottleneck in my workflow.

It seems that cross compilation is in a state of flux (https://discourse.ros.org/t/call-for-help-maintainership-of-the-ros-cross-compile-tool/26511/9). I am looking for recommendations for how to proceed.

For reasons, I am using ROS Eloquent, but I'm hoping any solution is agnostic to the ROS version (so that it works when we use a more modern distro). For concreteness, I've created a minimum example: https://github.com/ggoretkin-bdai/example_msgs

I can produce both

ros-eloquent-foopkg-msgs_0.0.0-0bionic_amd64.deb

and

ros-eloquent-foopkg-msgs_0.0.0-0bionic_arm64.deb

and I would like to produce the arm64.deb more efficiently by running compilation natively. Ultimately CMake needs a configuration like https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/manual/cmake-toolchains.7.html#cross-compiling-for-linux .