Linaro Cross Compiling

Hello all, I've been playing around with linaro and have it working on my Pandaboard locally. I have a couple of questions about the linaro environment; if this is the wrong forum, I'm happy to take it elsewhere. I see that Linaro makes monthly releases of the hwpacks and images. How are the packages/binaries in those images created? Are they cross-compiled, or compiled natively on the target platform? If they are cross-compiled, how is the environment created? The reason I ask is that we've been looking at cross-compiling some packages ourselves, and have been running into issues. So we were wondering what toolchain the linaro community uses.

Thanks in advance,