BeagleBone Cross Compiling using OSX on the Mac (using Linux)

Although it may seem more complicated, I decided the best way to cross-compile from my Mac would be to do it from a Linux system.

I would of course love to have my BeagleBone cross-development environment running directly on OSX, but that’s an effort for another day – my goal here was to be able to cross-compile for the BeagleBone.

Yes, in theory this should be possible on a Mac since it’s Unix-based, but it appears to me that may be more pain. More pain than just setting up an Ubuntu system using VMWare Fusion anyway. This is quite easy these days – both VMWare and Parallels make it almost effortless. There are many many resources on how to do this, so I’m not going to cover that here.

With Ubuntu 12.04 running happily in a VMWare VM on my MacBook Pro, away I went.

So to just cross-compile, it doesn’t appear that you really need the OpenEmbedded and Angstrom kernel stuff, so I went with just the Angstrom pre-built toolchain available at:
http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/toolchains/

I used angstrom-2011.03-i686-linux-armv7a-linux-gnueabi-toolchain.tar.bz2
This is the 32-bit version, which matches my Ubuntu VM setup. There is a 64-bit version there as well, if you are running a 64-bit version of Linux on your host system.

Step-by-Step

On the Cross-development Host

Extract the pre-built angstrom toolchain:

    $ cd /
    $ sudo tar -xf <path to the angstrom toolchain>

Which creates the new directories /usr/local/angstrom and /var/lib/opkg.

Run the environment setup script, which puts the new tools in the path as well as sets up several other environment variables:

    $ . /usr/local/angstrom/arm/environment-setup

Create a simple “Hello, world” program using whatever editor you prefer. I named mine “hello.c”.

    #include <stdio.h>

    int main()
    {
        printf( "Hello, worldn" );
    }

And finally, do a test build.

    $ arm-angstrom-linux-gnueabi-gcc hello.c -o hello

This should result in an executable file named hello. (This is a Csource file, so I used gcc, but you can also change the gcc at the end of the command to g++ to compile C++ source code.

On the BeagleBone

If you transfer the executable binary output file hello to your BeagleBone (e.g. via FTP), you should be able to run it and see the text “Hello, world” printed out in the BeagleBone terminal.

    $ ./hello
    Hello, world

Resources

This guide is based on bits of information gleaned from a variety of sources, including:

Linux To Go
electrons on radio
Trey Weaver’s Blog
gpio.kaltpost.de

Thanks to everyone who has blogged about their experiences with the BeagleBone!