Cross Compiling libavg for ARM

libavg is a high-level development platform for media-centric applications using Python as scripting language and written in C++.

Bear in mind that are many dependencies with libavg 1.6. I have not built all the libraries required, but instead simply taken the pre-built binaries and header files in the qemu overo image and copied the files as follows:

mkdir mnt
sudo mount -o loop,offset=$[106496*512] overo_sd_alip.img mnt
mkdir ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib -p
mkdir ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/include
cp mnt/usr/lib/* ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/ -rf -d
cp mnt/lib/* ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/ -rf -d
cp /mnt/usr/include/* ~/edev/beagleboard/libs/include -rf -d
sudo umount mnt

The -d flag skips the symlink, so we need to recreate then for all library so that the compiler can find libname.so instead of libname.so.12. Save the following scripts to symlinks.sh:

and run it where the arm libraries are located (in my case in /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib, /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/arm-linux-gnueabi and /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/mesa). This will  create symlinks for most libraries, but not all. Some will still have to be created manually, e.g.:

ln -s libboost_thread.so.1.42.0 libboost_thread.so
ln -s libcrypto.so.0.9.8 libcrypto.so
ln -s libssl.so.0.9.8 libssl.so

Also delete the symlink between libjpeg.so and libjpeg.so.8 since we use another version of the library.

If a symlink is missing, we would generally get a warning of the type:

/usr/lib/gcc/arm-linux-gnueabi/4.6.1/../../../../arm-linux-gnueabi/bin/ld: warning: libGL.so.1, needed by /home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib/libGLU.so, not found (try using -rpath or -rpath-link)

Once this is done, here are the instructions to cross-compile libavg 1.6 for ARM:

1. First build and install MesaLib for ARM (version 7.9.2), as the default Mesa/OpenGL library in the qemu image has more dependencies.
2. Download libavg 1.6 source code
   

   wget http://www.libavg.de/raw-attachment/wiki/DownLoad/libavg-1.6.0.tar.gz

3. Extract it
   

   tar xzvf libavg-1.6.0.tar.gz
   cd libavg-1.6.0

4. Install the following development packages:
   

   sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev libpango1.0-dev libgraphicsmagick++1-dev libavformat-dev libavcodec-dev libfaad-dev libgsm1-dev libogg-dev libschroedinger-dev libspeex-dev libswscale-dev libboost-dev libboost-thread-dev

5. Remove SSE2 options in configure script:
   

   cat configure | sed s/-msse2// > configure.arm
   mv configure.arm configure
   chmod 755 configure

6. There is some x86 assembler in the code, we need to disable it.
   Edit src/base/Exception.ccp and comment out the line:

   asm(“int $3”);

7. To prevent testplayer from failing. Edit src/player/Makefile and make sure your replace occurences of -L/usr/include -lSDL, by -L/home/jaufranc/edev/beagleboard/libs/lib and create a symlink for the SDL library:
   

   ln -s libSDL-1.2.so libSDL.so

   You may also need to edit the Makefile as above for src/anim and src/wrapper

8. Configure, build and install libavg:

This was tested in Ubuntu 11.04 (natty) with linaro gcc toolchain.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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