Today, perl is only available on the host, it is not installed on the chromebook (perl is in package.provided).
However, xfstests, a framework to test filesystem, relies on perl script.
Unfortunately, cross compiling perl is not straight-forward, a machine with the right architecture needs to be connected to the host for compiling a full fledged perl.
However, if the target architecture is similar to the host and a subset of perl is needed, we can use 'miniperl', a simple perl interpreter compiled for the host to run the compilation process.
Comment 1 by gwendal@chromium.org
, Jun 17 2016