ARM cross compiling

Cross Compiling for ARM

The ARM core on the DE-10 Nano is an ARM Cortex-A9 dual core You can grab a cross compiler for compiling ARM binaries on a 64bit intel based desktop system - eg OSX, Linux, or Windows (in the Linux subsystem)

Using a cross compiler on a Linux system

wget -c https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-a/10.2-2020.11/binrel/gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-x86_64-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf.tar.xz

Unpack somewhere useful, eg /opt

tar xf gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-x86_64-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf.tar.xz

and add to your path

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-x86_64-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf/bin

optionally set CC export CC='/opt/gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-x86_64-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf/bin/arm-none-linux-gnueabihf-gcc'

then follow up with the usual make..

Using Docker

Docker has a arm7 cross compiler which is easy to install on Mac or Linux (assuming you have docker installed already!)

docker run --rm dockcross/linux-armv7 > /usr/local/sbin/dockcross-linux-armv7

chmod +x /usr/local/sbin/dockcross-linux-armv7

You can then cross-compile with

/usr/local/sbin/dockcross-linux-armv7 make ./MakeFile

or (to compile a fictitious hello.c -> hello.arm)

/usr/local/sbin/dockcross-linux-armv7 bash -c '$CC hello.c -o hello.arm'

Using msys on Windows 10 (Note that WSL is the recommended approach for compiling under Windows)

After installing msys, download the current 10.2 binary release from the ARM site e.g. gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-mingw-w64-i686-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf.tar.xz From this location: https://developer.arm.com/tools-and-software/open-source-software/developer-tools/gnu-toolchain/gnu-a/downloads

Note: the 10.3 version has isssues; please do not use that version.

Place the tar.xz file into your /opt/ folder under msys (e.g. C:\msys64\opt\); to decompress it, do the following from within MSYS:

cd /opt

unxz *.xz

tar xvf gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-mingw-w64-i686-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf.tar

Then, you will probably want to rename the "gcc-arm-10.2-2020.11-mingw-w64-i686-arm-none-linux-gnueabihf" folder to something shorter, like "arm".

Then when running MSYS set your PATH variable to point to it:

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/<folder name from above>/bin

Alternatives

Another, more complicated option for big projects targeting for ARM