Cross-compiling for Raspberry Pi on Ubuntu
While the Raspberry Pi 2 has four cores to churn through code, it still takes longer to compile than on most workstations and laptops. If you are feeling adventurous, you can try cross-compiling which has become easier to set up and get working.
Cross-compiling is when binaries created are for another target architecture than the one you are compiling on. This kind of set up is very typical when creating Android applications. The end result is that you can take the resulting binary and place on its target platform, and it will run there.
There are even tricks to getting the cross-compiled binary to also run on your native system!
In this guide, I’ll walk you through:
- Setting up a cross-compile toolchain in Ubuntu (15.04 Vivid)
- Setting up the proper exports
- Compiling a test program for your native and target armhf platform
- Compiling the latest Raspberry Pi 2 kernel with VC4 support.
TxMongo – Your Asynchronous MongoDB Twisted Client
We’re proud to announce the release of 0.6 of TxMongo, which brings SSL support using Twisted’s SSL context factory, “find with cursor” support just like PyMongo, bug fixes and updated unit tests! TxMongo is an asynchronous MongoDB client written for Twisted in Python.
The biggest change is that TxMongo is now sponsored by Amplidata. Through them we were able to get development, bug fixes and Twisted first-party sponsorship online. We now have continuous integration (CI) with a wide matrix of support for py26/py27/pypy using Twisted 12.1 to 14.0 (and trunk). We also now have 78% code coverage with unit testing as a result!
This is also the very last release in the 0.x series before we step over to the “year.release” model used by Twisted, it will also eventually find its way into Twisted’s github organization as a first class library.
You can download TxMongo 0.6.0 and other releases here: TxMongo Github Releases
Written by Bret CurtisEnterprise all your Twisted applications with Ldaptor
We’re proud to announce the release of 14.0.0 of Ldaptor, now a first party Twisted project! Ldaptor is an asynchronous LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) client and server implementation written for Twisted in Python.
The biggest change is that Ldaptor is now sponsored by Amplidata. Through them we were able to get development, bug fixes and Twisted first-party sponsorship back online. We now have continuous integration (CI) with a wide matrix of support for py26/py27/pypy using Twisted 12.1 to 14.0 (and trunk). We also have about 75% code coverage with unit testing!
You can download 14.0.0 and other releases here: Ldaptor Github Releases
For a full review of what has changed, feel free to take a look at our live documentation over at ReadTheDocs: Ldaptor Documentation and the Changelog itself.
Written by Bret CurtisVideocoreIV Glamor on your Raspberry Pi
Running an X (Xorg) server on your Raspberry Pi is frustrating. You can either use the fbdev or fbturbo driver which will give an un-accelerated 2D environment with swrast 3D (OpenGL) all beating your poor RPi’s CPU. Overclocking it will only help you so much which is a pity considering that there is another layer on the SoC that would be perfect for that but is now unused.
Enter the VideocoreIV (VC4) and Eric Anholt (formally of Intel, now of Broadcom), who are going to breath new life into the RPi. The idea is to offload the 2D rendering, via Glamor, to the VC4 with OpenGL calls. Since a OpenGL stack needs to exist, that means there will be a Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Linux kernel module and Gallium/DRI module in Mesa.
This is happening now, here is the current status of support via the Piglit test-suite: skip 19102, fail 3866, pass 3146, crash 153, total 26267
Written by Bret CurtisDevelopment on the Raspberry Pi
Now that I’m a proud owner of a Raspberry Pi, I’ve being really stressing the little guy. There is only but so much a ARMv6 processor, on an microSD with only 512MiB of ram can do, which means that compiling on such a machine is going to take a really long time.
Take for example OpenMW, currently it takes about 4 minutes on a quad-core i7 to compile. You’re in for a treat on the Pi, it will take you at least a day, two days if you realize that half-way through the OOM Killer came through and killed your cc process. This is about the time you start wondering about various ways to improve the situation, such as a larger swap file or using zram.
At this point, I was wondering about other ways compiling binaries and packages for the Pi. There was cross-compiling, but then I would have to set up a full toolchain and recompile all the packages from scratch. That will have to be for another post though as it is another world. Another option is to try virtualizing the Pi and apparently QEMU gets us pretty darn close.
Written by Bret Curtis