Cross-compiling Rust for Alpine Linux on Raspberry Pi

Tue 15 Oct 2019 13:45 BST

Tony Garnock-Jones
#tech #rust #unix

I’ve just figured out (with the assistance of pages like japaric’s rust-cross guide) how to cross-build a small Rust project for FRμITOS, which is an Alpine Linux based distribution (using musl libc) for Raspberry Pi, using a Debian x86_64 host.

It was ultimately very nicely straightforward.

  1. Install the Debian binutils-arm-linux-gnueabihf package.
  2. Use rustup to install support for the armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf target.
  3. Set the CARGO_TARGET_ARMV7_UNKNOWN_LINUX_MUSLEABIHF_LINKER environment variable appropriately.
  4. Run cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf.

That’s it!

In shell script form:

sudo apt install binutils-arm-linux-gnueabihf
rustup target add armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf
CARGO_TARGET_ARMV7_UNKNOWN_LINUX_MUSLEABIHF_LINKER=arm-linux-gnueabihf-ld \
  cargo build --target=armv7-unknown-linux-musleabihf