Building for ARM systems

[Tristan Van Berkom]

Hi again,


> On Mar 7, 2017, at 11:05 AM, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear Flatpak'ers,
> As some of you already know, I've been poking around trying to find
> some kind of system where we can build the KDE runtime and
> applications for ARM.
> Now I can add that it's been without much luck. I'm sending this
> e-mail with my experience to put the problem in perspective so we can
> see if there's something we can do about it.
> 
> To clarify a bit, my goal initially was to get to run our applications
> on the Plasma Phone through Flatpak [1]. It's a Nexus 5, running an
> armhf ubuntu-based beast.
> 
> To compile it I thought it would work just to get a cheap-ish hosting
> service and use it for to build the binaries. I tried:
> - scaleway: there it wouldn't even start doing anything, presumably
> because it was missing neon?
> - "mything beasts" rpi hosting: somebody suggested it on #flatpak, the
> distro they have is too old and we can't add the ppa there for
> dependencies reasons. Didn't push it further.

I think you might be OK so long as that distro does not have an ancient linux kernel lacking the namespace features that bubblewrap requires.

Note that the automated builders do not require a flatpak installation to work, partly for historical reasons but also in order to easily update and build using the latest flatpak builder tooling.

If you have a nice fast aarch64 there which is desirable, you might try the build-setup.sh script from the build scripts repo[0] and run:

  ./build-setup.sh --refresh-tools

This should automatically download and build the latest flatpak builder tool and ostree into a local user prefix, which you can then use to run the builder with the right environment settings.

Hope this is helpful...

Cheers,
    -Tristan

[0]: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-build-scripts



> - rpi3 at home: using the SD was unbearably slow (we're talking ~1h to
> install the Freedesktop SDK) and I didn't have much time to spend on
> it. There could be some optimal set up, but I'm not convinced.
> 
> Anybody has a good idea of how to proceed?
> Would it make sense to invest some time into seeing if it's possible
> to cross-compile? I've seen some approach WRT using qemu too.
> 
> Thanks!
> Aleix
> 
> [1] https://twitter.com/AleixPol/status/834051053645594624
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