How to compile a source into an ARM binary

Question

I want to compile VTK-DICOM to run on an ARM Raspberry Pi (Raspbian). Is it posible? Where should I start?

It is ARMv6 as far a I can recall – arturojain Jan 06 '21 at 20:21 — arturojain, Jan 06 '21 at 20:21

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 06 '21 at 20:29

Building for Raspbian Debian Buster images and ARMv6

This tutorial also supports older Rasperry Pi (A, B, B+, Zero) based on the ARMv6 CPU. See also: GCC 8 Cross Compiler outputs ARMv7 executable instead of ARMv6

Set up the toolchain

There is no official git repository containing an updated toolchain (See https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools/issues/102).

Here is a github repository which includes building and precompiled toolchains for ARMv6 based on GCC8 and newer:

https://github.com/Pro/raspi-toolchain

As mentioned in the project's readme, these are the steps to get the toolchain. You can also build it yourself (see the README for further details).

Download the toolchain:

wget https://github.com/Pro/raspi-toolchain/releases/latest/download/raspi-toolchain.tar.gz

Extract it. Note: The toolchain has to be in /opt/cross-pi-gcc since it's not location independent.

sudo tar xfz raspi-toolchain.tar.gz --strip-components=1 -C /opt

You are done! The toolchain is now in /opt/cross-pi-gcc
Optional, add the toolchain to your path, by adding:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/cross-pi-gcc/bin

to the end of the file named ~/.bashrc

Now you can either log out and log back in (i.e. restart your terminal session), or run . ~/.bashrc in your terminal to pick up the PATH addition in your current terminal session.

Get the libraries from the Raspberry PI

To cross-compile for your own Raspberry Pi, which may have some custom libraries installed, you need to get these libraries onto your host.

Create a folder $HOME/raspberrypi. In your raspberrypi folder, make a folder called rootfs.

Now you need to copy the entire /liband /usr directory to this newly created folder. I usually bring the rpi image up and copy it via rsync:

rsync -vR --progress -rl --delete-after --safe-links pi@192.168.1.PI:/{lib,usr,opt/vc/lib} $HOME/raspberrypi/rootfs

where 192.168.1.PI is replaced by the IP of your Raspberry Pi.

Use CMake to compile your project

To tell CMake to take your own toolchain, you need to have a toolchain file which initializes the compiler settings.

Get this toolchain file from here: https://github.com/Pro/raspi-toolchain/blob/master/Toolchain-rpi.cmake

Now you should be able to compile your cmake programs simply by adding this extra flag: -D CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$HOME/raspberrypi/pi.cmake and setting the correct environment variables:

export RASPBIAN_ROOTFS=$HOME/raspberry/rootfs
export PATH=/opt/cross-pi-gcc/bin:$PATH
export RASPBERRY_VERSION=1
cmake -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=$HOME/raspberry/Toolchain-rpi.cmake ..

An example hello world is shown here: https://github.com/Pro/raspi-toolchain/blob/master/build_hello_world.sh

Source:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/58559140/13859552