Art of cross-compiling
Having a working cross toolchain is the starting point of a journey not the end of it. At some point, you will want to begin cross-compiling the various tools, applications, and libraries that you need for your target. Many of them will be open source packages, each of which has its own method of compiling and its own peculiarities.
Some common build systems include:
- Pure makefiles where the toolchain is usually controlled by the
makevariableCROSS_COMPILE - GNU Autotools build system
- CMake
Both Autotools and makefiles are needed to build even a basic embedded Linux system. CMake is cross-platform and has seen increased adoption over the years, especially among the C++ community. In this section, we will cover all three build tools.
Simple makefiles
Some important packages are very simple to cross-compile, including the Linux kernel, the U-Boot bootloader, and BusyBox. For each of these, you only need to put the toolchain...
