TechFindings

Update 2015-02-15: So far, I have failed building Nodejs v0.12.0 on ARMv5

I have a QNAP TS109 running Debian (port:armel, version:7), and of course I want to run node.js on it. I don’t think there are any binaries, so building from source is the way to go.

About my environment:

$ cat /etc/debian_version
7.2
$ gcc --version | head -n 1
gcc (Debian 4.6.3-14) 4.6.3
$ uname -a
Linux kvaser 3.2.0-4-orion5x #1 Debian 3.2.51-1 armv5tel GNU/Linux
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor       : Feroceon rev 0 (v5l)
BogoMIPS        : 331.77
Features        : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 5TEJ
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0x926
CPU revision    : 0

Hardware        : QNAP TS-109/TS-209
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 0000000000000000

I downloaded the latest version of node.js: node-v0.10.25, and this is how I ended up compiling it (first writing build.sh, then executing it as root):

$ cat build.sh
#!/bin/sh
export CFLAGS='-march=armv5t'
export CXXFLAGS='-march=armv5t'
./configure
make install
$ sudo ./build.sh

That takes almost four hours.

A few notes…

make install
Naturally, make install has to be run as root. When I do that, everything is built again, from scratch. This is not what I expect of make install, and to me this seems like a bug. This is why I put the build lines into a little shell script, and ran the entire script with sudo. Compiling as root does not make sense

-march=armv4 and -march=armv4t
Compiling with -march=armv4t (or no -march at all, defaulting to armv4 I believe) results in an error:

../deps/v8/src/arm/macro-assembler-arm.cc:65:3: error:
#error "For thumb inter-working we require an architecture which supports blx"

You can workaround this by above line 65 in the above file:

#define CAN_USE_THUMB_INSTRUCTIONS 1

as I mentioned in my old article about building Node.js on Debian ARM.

-march=armv5te
I first tried building with -march=armv5te (since that seemed closest to armv5tel which is what uname tells me I have). The build completed, but the node binary generated Segmentation fault (however node -h did work, so the binary was not completely broken).

I do not know if this problem is caused by my CPU not being compatible with/capable of armv5te, or, if there is something about armv5te that is not compatible with the way Debian and its libraries are built.