In this article, we'll build the master branch of gst-plugins-rs, the set of GStreamer plugins written in Rust, for the very popular Raspberry Pi board. Such crates will need to link to the system library when building and so require to have not only the library built for target platform but also extra metadata such as a pkg-config file used by the build system to retrieve the proper compiler and linker flags.

But everything falls apart as soon as one crate wraps a C or C++ system library, such as openssl or GStreamer. This works well enough for simple applications relying solely on Rust code. We can now very easily cross-build our Rust code using: $ cargo build -target=armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf Configure cargo for cross compilation by creating a ~/.cargo/config file with the following content:.Install the cross compiled standard crates: rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf.Install the C cross toolchain: sudo apt-get install -qq gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf.Let's have a look at this example from rust-cross demonstrating how to setup a cross-build environment for ARMv7 on an Ubuntu system with three simple steps: Cross compiling Rust codeįortunately, cross-building pure Rust code is generally much easier thanks to rustup and cargo. It's often very tricky to find the right combination of toolchains and sysroots and they are generally duct-taped together using various environment variables and hacky scripts.

Seting up such environnement can be a tedious process.

the set of libraries and headers for the target system which are needed to build the code, which is called the sysroot.

the building tools (compiler, linker, etc) able to run on the host but producing code for the target platform, which is called the toolchain.

Such environment is generally the aggregation of two parts: This requires a cross compiling environment on the host system configured according to the target settings. As a result it is important to be able to generate binaries compatible with the embedded platform (the target) directly from the developer system (the host). A typical embedded device may use an ARM CPU while our laptops and desktops are based on x86-64 platforms. Original photo by Stefan Cosma on UnsplashĮmbedded systems are generally based on architectures different than the one used on the computers that developers are using to develop their software. In this article, we'll explain an easy setup to cross build Rust code depending on system libraries, a common requirement when working on embedded systems. In our previous post we discussed about how Rust can be a great language for embedded programming.

Install gstreamer raspberry pi