Cross Compiling Rust for RPI4

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2020-07-07 17:03:14

I really enjoy writing Rust, I own a growing number of Raspberry PIs. The RPI4 is a big step forward in terms of hardware resources on the platform. It is however 64bit not 32 like its predecessors and requires a different tool chain for cross compilation. In this guide I will take you through the setup. If you just want something that works now, you can use the albeego/rust-musl-builder-aarch64:0.0.1 docker image.

A note here on linking, you will need to tell rust to use /usr/bin/aarch64-linux-gnu-gcc as the linker for the rust applications you compile. You can do this by including a .cargo/config file in your $HOME directory, the project directory with the following contents

One of the challenges with cross compiling rust applications is getting the dependencies correct for the build. Open SSL is pretty prevalent and if you are going to do anything web related, you will need it. This cannot be the pre-compiled Open SSL binaries that come with your OS, you need to produce a cross compiled binary for linking with your rust application. You don’t want to overwrite that pre-compile binary that came with your OS either. That would cause other issues! So, let’s make a place to store the cross compiled Open SSL binary and its source and open it in our terminal

Now we are ready to build Open SSL, we will configure it without ZLib (we need to provide our own cross compiled ZLib to consumers anyway), it needs to be non shared so we are not linking any of our x86_64 objects, position independent in memory and installed to a custom location