Building Dart SDK for ARM or RISC V

Introduction

The Dart VM runs on a variety of ARM processors on Linux and Android. This document explains how to build the Dart VM and SDK to target these platforms.

Cross-compiling

If you are building natively on the device you will be running on, you can skip this step. The build scripts download a cross-compilation toolchain using clang that supports ia32, x64, arm and arm64, so you do not need to install a cross-compiler yourself unless you want to target riscv.

Linux

If you are running Debian/Ubuntu, you can obtain a cross-compiler by doing the following:

$ sudo apt-get install g++-arm-linux-gnueabihf  # For 32-bit ARM (ARMv7)	
$ sudo apt-get install g++-aarch64-linux-gnu    # For 64-bit ARM (ARMv8)
$ sudo apt-get install g++-riscv64-linux-gnu    # For 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC)

Android

Follow instructions under "One-time Setup" under Android

Building

Linux

With the default Debian/Ubuntu toolchains, simply do:

$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma --no-clang -m release -a arm create_sdk
$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma --no-clang -m release -a arm64 create_sdk
$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma --no-clang -m release -a riscv64 create_sdk

You can also produce only a Dart VM runtime, no SDK, by replacing create_sdk with runtime. This process involves also building a VM that targets ia32/x64, which is used to generate a few parts of the SDK.

You can use a different toolchain using the -t switch. For example, if the path to your gcc is /path/to/toolchain/prefix-gcc, then you'd invoke the build script with:

$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma --no-clang -m release -a arm -t arm=/path/to/toolchain/prefix create_sdk
$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma --no-clang -m release -a arm64 -t arm64=/path/to/toolchain/prefix create_sdk
$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma --no-clang -m release -a riscv64 -t riscv64=/path/to/toolchain/prefix create_sdk

Android

The standalone Dart VM can also target Android. For ARM devices:

$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma -m release -a arm --os=android create_sdk

and ARM64 devices:

$ ./tools/build.py --no-goma -m release -a arm64 --os=android create_sdk

For all of these configurations, the runtime only can be built using the runtime target as above.

Debian Packages

You can create Debian packages targeting ARM as follows:

$ ./tools/create_tarball.py
$ ./tools/create_debian_packages.py -a {armhf, armel} [-t /path/to/cross/toolchain/prefix]

If you are on Ubuntu, and no -t switch is given, you'll get a Debian package targeting ARMv7. The argument to the -a switch should be appropriate for the platform you are targeting.