Comment # 3 on bug 1180500 from Richard Biener

(In reply to stephane nguyen from comment #2)
> I wanted to test cross compilation for various platforms, hence why I used
> cross-i386-*. This is not an issue in the sense that I could manually create
> symlinks into the /lib directory where I had the 32-bit libraries installed.
> 
> Just out of curiosity, what is the purpose of the cross-* packages if the
> cross-glibc's are not provided? Is this just a baseline for users to use and
> it's up to the users to build manually whatever libraries they need?

Their purpose is to be able to cross-build kernels only (which do not need
any target libraries).  In theory you could populate the sysroot with
a target filesystem but there's no way to use zypper to populate it from
a different architecture repository.