Qt Creator cross-platform development in Stretch: chroots

pdo debian eng qt-cross

My next step in creating a cross-platform Qt development environment is trying to set it up on a chroot and make it usable from Qt Creator, so that both buil-dependencies and cross-build-dependencies can be available even when they are not coinstallable.

Building a chroot

I built a chroot to host the armhf build-dependencies:

$ sudo cdebootstrap stretch arm-linux-gnueabihf
$ sudo systemd-nspawn -D arm-linux-gnueabihf
# dpkg --add-architecture armhf
# apt update
# apt install qtbase5-dev qtbase5-dev-tools qtbase5-dev:armhf

The cross-compilers need to be outside the chroot. I tried to use cross-compilers installed inside the chroot while building outside the chroot, and they fail to link at runtime, since they expect their shared libraries to be in /usr.

I put this qt.conf in the chroot:

[Paths]
Prefix=/home/enrico/…/arm-linux-gnueabihf/usr
ArchData=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5
Binaries=lib/qt5/bin
Data=share/qt5
Documentation=share/qt5/doc
Examples=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/examples
Headers=include/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5
HostBinaries=bin
HostData=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5
HostLibraries=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf
Imports=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/imports
Libraries=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf
LibraryExecutables=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/libexec
Plugins=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/plugins
Qml2Imports=lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/qml
Settings=/etc/xdg
Translations=share/qt5/translations
TargetSpec=arm-linux-gnueabihf

I added the custom mkspecs to the chroot:

$ cd arm-linux-gnueabihf/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/mkspecs/
$ sudo cp -r linux-g++ arm-linux-gnueabihf
$ sudo vi arm-linux-gnueabihf/qmake.conf

This is the content of usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt5/mkspecs/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qmake.conf:

#
# qmake configuration for arm-linux-gnueabihf
#

MAKEFILE_GENERATOR      = UNIX
CONFIG                 += incremental
QMAKE_INCREMENTAL_STYLE = sublib

include(../common/linux.conf)
include(../common/gcc-base-unix.conf)
include(../common/g++-unix.conf)

QMAKE_RPATHLINKDIR += /home/enrico/…/arm-linux-gnueabihf/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf
QMAKE_RPATHLINKDIR += /home/enrico/…/arm-linux-gnueabihf/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf
QMAKE_RPATHLINKDIR += /home/enrico/…/arm-linux-gnueabihf/usr/lib/

QMAKE_COMPILER          = arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc

QMAKE_CC                = arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc

QMAKE_LINK_C            = $$QMAKE_CC
QMAKE_LINK_C_SHLIB      = $$QMAKE_CC

QMAKE_CXX               = arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++

QMAKE_LINK              = $$QMAKE_CXX
QMAKE_LINK_SHLIB        = $$QMAKE_CXX

load(qt_config)

Note QMAKE_RPATHLINKDIR, which was not present in the previous post: since linking needs to happen against libraries in /home/enrico/…/arm-linux-gnueabihf/…, we need to tell the linker not to go and search in /.

The extra QMAKE_RPATHLINKDIR pointing to usr/lib is a workaround for libsrtp0 installing files outside multiarch directories (#765173):

# dpkg -L libsrtp0 | grep usr/lib
/usr/lib
/usr/lib/libsrtp.so.0.0
/usr/lib/libsrtp.so.0

(libsrtp0 is a dependency of libqt5webenginecore5)

I changed the wrapper /usr/local/bin/qmake-arm-linux-gnueabihf to point to the chroot:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import sys, os

QT_CONFIG = "/home/enrico/…/arm-linux-gnueabihf/qt.conf"

argv0 = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(sys.argv[0]), "qmake")

if len(sys.argv) == 1:
    os.execv("/usr/bin/qmake", [argv0] + sys.argv[1:])
else:
    os.execv("/usr/bin/qmake", [argv0] + sys.argv[1:] + ["-qtconf", QT_CONFIG])

And it all works. Even the test application that requires QtWebEngine builds and links fine.

Credits

This has been done as part of my work with Truelite.