Linaro Cross-Compile Setup on Ubuntu 12.04

This is a simple guide that shows how to set up an Ubuntu 12.04 based build environment for Linaro.

It is convenient to use a virtual machine for a build environment since you can share it with other team members and also make backups for the entire system by simply duplicating the virtual hard disk.

The first step is to download Ubuntu 12.04 Server 64 bit. If you are not a fan of CLI, you should try to get used to it! :P The Server edition is more light-weight, more optimised for throughput and uses less RAM, letting you get faster builds. If you are installing on a PC or inside a VM the process is pretty much the same – I'll leave it to you! I would recommend at least 2 GB RAM, and 2 CPU’s, though.

I decided to install OpenSSH Server as well as SAMBA file sharing so that I can easily get files onto and off of the machine. I won't explain how to set these up – there are plenty of guides online already!

Install Some Packages

Once the machine is installed there are quite a few packages we need to install. Please type the commands below:

sudo apt-get install build-essential git ccache zlib1g-dev gawk bison flex gettext uuid-dev

Since we are on a 64 bit machine and the Linaro binaries rely on 32 bit as of present, you also need to install 32 bit libs:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

Finally, since we will probably be compiling a kernel at some point, we need ncurses for make menuconfig:

sudo apt-get install ncurses-dev

All together this is about 200 MB of downloads. Feel free to combine all the packages into one command and go grab a coffee if you aren't on a fast connection!

Install the Cross-Compiler

The Linaro project is becoming the industry standard in ARM platforms, in my opinion. They regularly produce cross-toolchains (a difficult and tedious task to do one-self) as well as following the Ubuntu release schedule and making some tweaks and releasing an ARM optimised version.

At the moment we are only interested in the toolchain. Please browse to https://releases.linaro.org/ to see what’s available and what the latest reasonable packages are. At the time of writing, 13.11 is the latest but I will be using 13.10 as this has already been compiled by some good people: https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries

It’s a good idea to create a new directory in your home directory (or wherever you want) for any Linaro related stuff. I’ll be using ~/linaro/ as the directory for all linaro stuff. Download the latest pakage that has been built and extract it:

cd ~/linaro

wget https://launchpad.net/linaro-toolchain-binaries/trunk/2013.10/+download/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.8-2013.10_linux.tar.xz

tar xJf gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.8-2013.10_linux.tar.xz

Remember the handy shortcut of pressing TAB after typing a few letters to auto-complete the rest of the file name!

You will now have extracted a new folder with the cross-compiler toolchain inside it. We will export a variable that will point to this directory so that we can call the GCC, etc. inside easily. I am going to name this variable something useful, besides just CC (cross-compiler) since it is probable that I will be downloading newer versions of the toolchain in future and I would like to be able to access any of them!

export CC201310=`pwd`/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.8-2013.10_linux/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-

Naturally you will replace the names with whatever version you are using. The `pwd` part prints the working directory. It’s a shortcut to writing out /home/you/linaro/, which you could do if you wanted to!

Now, whenever you type ${CC201310} followed by a command like gcc, you are actually pointing to that command inside the ${CC201310} directory. To test:

${CC201310}gcc --version

Should give you a result! If you get an error, make sure you installed everything earlier and the export went well.

You should export this every time you boot the machine, or stick it into a script that runs on boot. We can do this by adding a line at the end of ~/.bashrc:

export CC201310=/home/you/linaro/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-4.8-2013.10_linux/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-

That’s it!

Congratulations! Pretty simple, right? Now, if you want to make something using the cross compiler:

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=${CC201310}

Obviously this make command isn't going to work if you type it in... Follow the instructions of the software you are trying to install! The command above is just a template. 

I should add that as of writing, the compiler is by default set up for any ARM Cortex with VFPv3 FPU but is tuned for the Cortex-A9. If you want to optimise for the Cortex-A7, etc. then you should specify this to the compiler. See http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/ARM-Options.html. 

For the Cortex-A7, some example flags are below. Also note that you will have to do some extra reading on how to actually set these flags. The toolchain set up in this post should be adequate to get you going with no further tweaking...

-mcpu=cortex-a7 –mtune=cortex-a7 –mfpu=neon-vfpv4