This is a rough guide on how to set up cross compilation between a BeagleBone BELA and an OSX machine. It is based on the description in the README_BELA file of the SuperCollider installation.

Set date Link to heading

For proper compilation, it is necessary that the BELA board’s time is reasonably similar to your main machine.

dpkg-reconfigure tzdata # configure your time zone
ntpdate pool.ntp.org    # sync time once with an ntp server
date                    # make sure this gives the right result

Since the BBB does not feature a realtime clock that survives reboots, you have to repeat this procedure every time you reboot the board. To prevent that, you might want to set up [[posts/2017-08-06-ntp-on-bela-board|NTP]].

Preparation Link to heading

Since BELA’s SuperCollider compiles on gcc4.8, you need the crosscompiler for arm linux. You can find binaries here. This package installs arm-linux compilers in an exotic directory, which needs to be in your PATH variable:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/linaro/arm-linux-gnueabihf/bin

To prevent mixups of gcc versions, I created symbolic links of gcc and g++ to name the specific versions:

cd /usr/local/linaro/arm-linux-gnueabihf/bin/
ln -s arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc-4.8
ln -s arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++ arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.8

Install distcc on both your main machine and the BELA. For OSX, this is easily done with homebrew by

brew install distcc

on the BELA this is done via

apt-get install -t jessie distcc

Compile Link to heading

To ensure proper connection, do not attempt to cross-compile over a wireless connection. It will just not work properly.

On your main machine, run distcc via

distccd --verbose --no-detach --daemon --allow 192.168.7.2 --log-level error --log-file ~/distccd.log

Alternatively, you can set the allowed IP address to the range of your ethernet connection, this could be e.g. 192.168.1.0/22.

Optionally, you might want to set the log level to info in order to see some output in the log files, even when the compiler is initiated. I found this very helpful in gaining trust in the system.

Watch the helpfile via

tail ~/distccd.log

On the BELA board, announce the IP to send compile directives to and how the compilers are called

export DISTCC_HOSTS="192.168.7.1"
export CC="/usr/bin/distcc arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc-4.8"
export CXX="/usr/bin/distcc arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++-4.8"

Make sure you don’t pass -march=native to the compiler when using distcc, or it will compile natively (for your main machine). So do not pass -DNATIVE=ON to cmake.

Building, then, is pretty straight forward:

mkdir build; cd build

# cmake
cmake .. -DNOVA_SIMD=ON -DSSE=OFF -DSSE2=OFF -DINSTALL_HELP=OFF -DSC_QT=OFF -DSC_IDE=OFF -DSC_EL=OFF -DSC_ED=OFF -DSC_VIM=OFF -DSUPERNOVA=OFF -DNO_AVAHI=ON -DENABLE_TESTSUITE=OFF -DAUDIOAPI=bela

# make will take about 10 minutes, observe the log files on your main machine
make -j8
make install

SC3 plugins setup is similar, only the configuration step is different:

cmake -DSC_PATH="/usr/local/include/SuperCollider/" ..