How to Cross Compile Simple DirectMedia Layer a Step by Step Guide

Introduction

This tutorial will show how to cross compile the Simple DirectMedia Layer library on an GNU Linux embedded platform.

Overview of the project

Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide low level access to audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, 3D hardware via OpenGL, and 2D video framebuffer. It is used by MPEG playback software, emulators, and many popular games, including the award winning Linux port of "Civilization: Call To Power."

SDL supports Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. The code contains support for AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS, and OS/2, but these are not officially supported.

SDL is written in C, but works with C++ natively, and has bindings to several other languages, including Ada, C#, D, Eiffel, Erlang, Euphoria, Guile, Haskell, Java, Lisp, Lua, ML, Objective C, Pascal, Perl, PHP, Pike, Pliant, Python, Ruby, Smalltalk, and Tcl.

SDL is distributed under GNU LGPL version 2. This license allows you to use SDL freely in commercial programs as long as you link with the dynamic library.

To find out more about SDL and its components see the project's website http://www.libsdl.org.

Download

The SDL library releases can be found at: http://www.libsdl.org/download-1.2.php.

The latest available release by the time of writing of this tutorial is 1.2.13 (January 05th 2001).

To download this release, just type the following command:

wget http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.13.tar.gz

Environment Setup

The host machine will be a PC with a GNU Linux distribution installed.
The embedded platform might be constructed on top of one of the following architectures:

arm.
mips.
mipsel.
ppc.
sparc.

Prerequisites

To cross compile the SDL library, you need either a cross compiler, or an emulated Linux running on top of a virtualization software such as QEMU, matching your specific targeted platform.

In order to build yourself such a cross compiler, at crosstool page we introduced the way to build a C,C++ 4.1 GNU compiler for an ARM platform.

Also, hackers will be interested finding all the details to setup an ARM Debian system on their traditional Ubuntun distro following the indications quoted in this other arm-debian-on-ubuntu.

The SDL library does not need any specific dependencies.

The Cross compilation process

Option 1: Using a cross compiler

Assumptions
During the process, we will assume the cross toolchain is called xxx-yyy-linux-gnu, meaning that the gcc, g++, ar, ..., ld utilities are prefixed by xxx-yyy-linux-gnu. For example, for this toolchain the C compiler is called xxx-yyy-linux-gnu-gcc.

We will also assume that the bin, include, lib and libexec folders of the cross toolchain are accessible through the PATH variable environment in order to work with the compilers from any place in the file system.

Finally, we suppose it is intalled in the following folder: /opt/crosstool/gcc-4.1.2-glibc-2.3.2/xxx-yyy-linux-gnu.

Organization

As mentioned above:

The release being cross compiled is: 1.2.13
The tar.gz file will then be extracted under: /opt/external_packages/sdl/1.2.13/source
The results of the compilation will be stored under: /opt/external_packages/sdl/1.2.13/compiled/xxx-yyy-linux-gnu

The files resulting from the cross compilation are listed here (the content of the share folder is intentionaly not displayed):

.:
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-10 16:18 bin
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-10 16:18 include
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2008-03-10 16:18 lib
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2008-03-10 16:18 share

./bin:
total 4
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1281 2008-03-10 16:18 sdl-config

./include:
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL

./include/SDL:
total 580
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4336 2008-03-10 16:18 begin_code.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1423 2008-03-10 16:18 close_code.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1875 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_active.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  10879 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_audio.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    910 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_byteorder.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   5657 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_cdrom.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   8953 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_config.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2303 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_cpuinfo.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   5653 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_endian.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1762 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_error.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  12564 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_events.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    910 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_getenv.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   3133 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   5203 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_joystick.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   3885 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_keyboard.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   7160 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_keysym.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2769 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_loadso.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2732 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_main.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4689 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_mouse.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   5707 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_mutex.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    183 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_name.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 336232 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_opengl.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2516 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_platform.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   1919 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_quit.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4783 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_rwops.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  15662 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_stdinc.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   5991 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_syswm.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4436 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_thread.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   4424 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_timer.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    910 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_types.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   2557 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_version.h
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  37051 2008-03-10 16:18 SDL_video.h

./lib:
total 2300
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      20 2008-03-10 16:18 libSDL-1.2.so.0 -> libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  941207 2008-03-10 16:18 libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1389128 2008-03-10 16:18 libSDL.a
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root     851 2008-03-10 16:18 libSDL.la
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    3318 2008-03-10 16:18 libSDLmain.a
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root      20 2008-03-10 16:18 libSDL.so -> libSDL-1.2.so.0.11.2
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    4096 2008-03-10 16:18 pkgconfig

./lib/pkgconfig:
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 519 2008-03-10 16:18 sdl.pc

Cross Compiling

Step 1

Install the SDL library by untaring it in /opt/external_packages/sdl/1.2.13/source folder and then cd to this directory.

Note:
All the directories and files listed below must be moved from the SDL-1.2.13 folder
to its parent folder (/opt/external_packages/SDL/1.2.13/source).

Directories and files:

   acinclude.m4   CREDITS             MPWmake.sea.bin  README.NanoX    README.SVN      SDL.spec      Watcom-OS2.zip
   autogen.sh     CWprojects.sea.bin  README           README.NDS      README.Symbian  SDL.spec.in   Watcom-Win32.zip
   Borland.html   docs                README.AmigaOS   README.OS2      README.Watcom   src           WhatsNew
   Borland.zip    docs.html           README.BeOS      README.PicoGUI  README.WinCE    symbian.zip   Xcode.tar.gz
   BUGS           include             README.CVS       README.Porting  README.wscons   test
   build-scripts  INSTALL             README.DC        README.QNX      sdl-config.in   TODO
   configure      Makefile.dc         README.MacOS     README.Qtopia   sdl.m4          VisualCE.zip
   configure.in   Makefile.in         README.MacOSX    README.RISCOS   sdl.pc.in       VisualC.html
   COPYING        Makefile.minimal    README.MiNT      README-SDL.txt  SDL.qpg.in      VisualC.zip

Step 2

We want to cross compile SDL with the its default options, then we configure the software by typing the following command:

./configure --host=xxx-yyy-linux-gnu --prefix=/opt/external_packages/sdl/1.2.13/compiled/xxx-yyy-linux-gnu

Step 4

To compile and install the SDL library, type successively make and make install. You should find the directories and files listed above under /opt/external_packages/sdl/1.2.13/compiled/xxx-yyy-linux-gnu/.

Option 2: Using QEMU

This section is not yet available.

Download

arm-SDL-1.2.13-tar.gz

You may consult this section if you want to download the SDL library already cross compiled for your target platform if it is available. You can also contribute to expand the crosscompile.org community by uploading your own results in the case a given platform is not already supported.

Supported platforms

arm-unknown-linux-gnu

Written by David Sayada.

Edit History Last Modified March 10, 2008

crosscompile.org

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How to Cross Compile Simple DirectMedia Layer a Step by Step Guide

Introduction

Overview of the project

Download

Environment Setup

Prerequisites

The Cross compilation process

Option 1: Using a cross compiler

Organization

Cross Compiling

Step 1

Step 2

Step 4

Option 2: Using QEMU

Download

Supported platforms