Installing a cross toolchain and QEMU

One way to try things on an ARM machine is to actually do so on a physical ARM-based SBC; for example, the Raspberry Pi is a very popular choice. In this case, the typical development workflow is to first build the ARM code on your x86-64 host system. But to do so, we need to install a cross toolchain – a set of tools allowing you to build software on one host CPU designed to execute on a different target CPU. An x86-64 host building programs for an ARM target is a very common case, and indeed is our use case here. Details on installing the cross compiler follow shortly.

Often, an alternate way to just trying things out is to have an ARM/Linux system emulated – this alleviates the need for hardware! To do so, we recommend using the superb QEMU project (https://www.qemu.org/).

To install the required QEMU packages, do the following:

• For installation on Ubuntu, use the following:

sudo apt install qemu-system-arm

• For installation on Fedora, use the following:

sudo dnf install qemu-system-arm-<version#>

To get the version number on Fedora, just type the preceding command and after typing the required package name (here, qemu-system-arm-), press the Tab key twice. It will auto-complete, providing a list of choices. Choose the latest version and press Enter.

CentOS 8 does not seem to have a simple means to install the QEMU package we require. (You could always install a cross toolchain via the source, but that's challenging; or, obtain an appropriate binary package.) Due to these difficulties, we will skip showing cross-compilation on CentOS.