ndn-embedded

Cross-compiling NDN projects for Raspberry Pi

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Note: before reading this document, you should already be familiar with the basic concepts of compiling and linking (especially the linking part). If not, you may be interested in reading this great book: [Linkers and Loaders](http://www.amazon.com/Linkers-Kaufmann-Software-Engineering-Programming/dp/1558604960/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1394130356&sr=8-1&keywords=linker+and+loader)

Basic idea

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Remember to compile a C/C++ project, we need the source code for the project, the header files for the included libraries, the binary objects of the libraries, and the compiler tools (gcc, as, ld, etc.). The combination of the last three things together is referred to as a _building environment_. Cross-compiling is no different. To cross compile a project, we first need to setup the building environment and then build the source code in that environment.

Difference between "native compiling" and "cross compiling"

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The biggest difference is that for native compiling, you build the binaries that will run on the same platform where you build them. For cross compiling, however, you build the binaries on one platform (called _build_ platform) and run them on another platform (called _host_ or _target_ platform). The platforms may differ in the operating systems (Windows vs. Linux) and/or the CPU architectures (x86_64 vs. arm32).

Raspberry Pi platform information

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Raspberry Pi runs on *ARMv6* CPU, which is a 32bit chip with hardware float-point support (abbreviated as *armhf*). There are many operating systems available. The one we are going to use is called *Raspbian*, which is a port of the Debian "wheezy" Linux distribution.

Creating compiling toolchain for Raspberry Pi

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To prepare a building environment, we need to get the gcc/g++ compiler toolchain that will generate binaries for the armhf platform. Raspbian already provided a set of compiling tools on their official [github](https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools). However, by the time of this writing, those tools only run on 32bit Linux systems. If we want to use 64bit Linux as the build platform, we may need to build our own gcc/g++ toolchain.

The tool we are going to use to build our gcc is [ct-ng](http://crosstool-ng.org/). It is designed to run on Linux but can be adjusted via some hacks to run on MacOSX. It is pretty easy to use and you may find this [article](http://www.kitware.com/blog/home/post/426) very helpful when building your own toolchain.

Tip: you may use the configuration file from Raspbian [github](https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools/blob/master/configs/bcm2708hardfp-ct-ng.config), which will load the "official" configurations for the platform.

Getting libraries ready

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After we have the toolchain, the next step is to gather the libraries, including the header files (_.h_ files) and the binaries (_.a, .so_ files). The libraries used by the NDN projects include *openssl, Boost, sqlite3, crypto++*. Those libraries may recursively depend on other libraries and it will be a big headache to compile all of them from source code and resolve the dependencies manually. Fortunately, Raspbian has a public package repo containing the binaries for most packages available on Debian. So the easy walk-around is to _install_ those libraries directly on Raspberry Pi using _apt-get_