CROOS COMPILING NODE FOR ARM

[Home] cross compiling node.js for arm

Goal

Quickly build nodejs for an ARM target system using a pre-built toolchain. The first part of these instructions should apply to most cross-compiling situations.

Cross-compiling

You'll need a prebuilt toolchain. I'm going to suggest CodeSourcery because TI uses them. The caveat is that their versions of libc and such may not fit well with your linux-arm distribution.

CodeSourcery arm-none-linux-gnueabi- Toolchain

• Direct download

After downloading:

mkdir /opt/code-sourcery/
tar xf arm-2009q1-203-arm-none-linux-gnueabi-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.bz2 -C /opt/code-sourcery/

Set Environment

Copied from OpenEmbedded and modified for CodeSourcery. This can probably still be pruned a little bit, but it's good enough for now for me.

Sometimes this exits right away. I don't know why. Running it again seems to solve the problem.

cross-compiler-shell.sh

#!/bin/sh -e
export CSTOOLS=/opt/code-sourcery/arm-2009q1
export CSTOOLS_INC=${CSTOOLS}/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/libc/usr/include
export CSTOOLS_LIB=${CSTOOLS}/arm-none-linux-gnueabi/libc/usr/lib
export TARGET_ARCH="-march=armv7-a" # must be at least armv5te
export TARGET_TUNE="-mtune=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -mthumb-interwork -mno-thumb" # optional

export CPP="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc -E"
export STRIP="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-strip"
export OBJCOPY="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-objcopy"
export AR="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-ar"
export F77="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-g77 ${TARGET_ARCH} ${TARGET_TUNE}"
unset LIBC
export RANLIB="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-ranlib"
export LD="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-ld"
export LDFLAGS="-L${CSTOOLS_LIB} -Wl,-rpath-link,${CSTOOLS_LIB} -Wl,-O1 -Wl,--hash-style=gnu"
export MAKE="make"
export CXXFLAGS="-isystem${CSTOOLS_INC} -fexpensive-optimizations -frename-registers -fomit-frame-pointer -O2 -ggdb3 -fpermissive -fvisibility-inlines-hidden"
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
export HOME="/home/peru"
export CCLD="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc ${TARGET_ARCH} ${TARGET_TUNE}"
export PATH="${CSTOOLS}/bin:/opt/code-sourcery/arm-2009q1/bin/:${HOME}/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"
export CFLAGS="-isystem${CSTOOLS_INC} -fexpensive-optimizations -frename-registers -fomit-frame-pointer -O2 -ggdb3"
export OBJDUMP="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-objdump"
export CPPFLAGS="-isystem${CSTOOLS_INC}"
export CC="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc ${TARGET_ARCH} ${TARGET_TUNE}"
export TITOOLSDIR="/mnt/data/overo-oe/ti"
export TERM="screen"
export SHELL="/bin/bash"
export CXX="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-g++ ${TARGET_ARCH} ${TARGET_TUNE}"
export NM="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-nm"
export AS="arm-none-linux-gnueabi-as"

bash --norc

Patch node.js for cross-compilation

mkdir ~/src
cd ~/src
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/node-v0.1.104.tar.gz
tar xf node*
cd node*
cp deps/libev/wscript deps/libev/wscript.orig
cp wscript wscript.orig

Patch libev/wscript

--- a/deps/libev/wscript
+++ b/deps/libev/wscript
@@ -41,6 +41,7 @@ def configure(conf):
     conf.check_cc(header_name="sys/eventfd.h", function_name="eventfd")


+  ''' Can't run cross-binary code
   code = """
       #include <syscall.h>
       #include <time.h>
@@ -54,6 +55,8 @@ def configure(conf):
   """
   conf.check_cc(fragment=code, define_name="HAVE_CLOCK_SYSCALL", execute=True,
                 msg="Checking for SYS_clock_gettime")
+  '''
+  conf.define('HAVE_CLOCK_SYSCALL', 1)

   have_librt = conf.check(lib='rt', uselib_store='RT')
   if have_librt:


vim wscript

--- a/wscript
+++ b/wscript
@@ -319,11 +319,15 @@ def v8_cmd(bld, variant):
   if bld.env['DEST_CPU'] == 'x86_64':
     arch = "arch=x64"

+ cross_arch = False
+ # TODO would use -1 != str.find('linux-gnueabi'), but this is sometimes a string and other times an array
+ # if bld.env['AR'] == 'arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-ar':
+ #   arch = "arch=arm"
+ #   cross_arch = True
+ # 
+ arch = "arch=arm"
+ cross_arch = True

   if variant == "default":
     mode = "release"
   else:
     mode = "debug"

+  snapshot = 'snapshot=on'
+  if cross_arch:
+    snapshot = ''
-  cmd_R = 'python "%s" -j %d -C "%s" -Y "%s" visibility=default mode=%s %s library=static snapshot=on'
+  cmd_R = 'python "%s" -j %d -C "%s" -Y "%s" visibility=default mode=%s %s library=static ' + snapshot

Cross-compile nodejs

cd ~/src/node*
~/cross-compiler-shell.sh
# prompt changes to a boring one without color
./configure --without-ssl # the codesourcery toolchain doesn't include openssl, but node mistakenly detected it
# Note you should see `arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc` instead of `gcc`
make

Updated at 2010-08-17

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