## Introduction
This repository is intended as a tutorial for building the GNU toolchain on Android, with support for Fortran. Prebuilt versions can be found in the Releases section.
It is based on my experience building OpenBLAS with LAPACK for Android and on several other sources, including this stackoverflow post and this Google group.
The whole process has become fairly easy, thanks to the new Python building scripts. A few modifications are still required, and the building process takes time.
This tutorial aims at building the GNU toolchain 4.9 with Android NDK r13b. It has been tested on Linux x86_64, but I expect that it should work with small changes on other systems supported by the NDK.
Past versions of this README covered building with Android NDK r11c & r12b. Please refer to those for special instructions.
Although the NDK supports Windows (32-bit & 64-bit variants), the toochain can only be built from Linux. The process is the roughly the same, with a few extra steps detailed along the way.
A few tools are required for building the toolchain, namely:
- git
- repo
- make
- gcc
- g++
- m4
- texinfo
- bison
- flex
On Debian-based Linux, you can run:
sudo apt-get install git repo make gcc g++ m4 texinfo bison flex
Note: When building the toolchain for Windows, mingw-w64 is required. For 32-bit, gcc-multilib and g++-multilib are also needed.
The easiest way to setup all required sources is to follow the official steps (found here).
In this repository, call:
repo init -u https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest -b gcc
You can then use repo sync
to clone all parts of the toolchain,
and repo forall -c git checkout ndk-r13-release
to checkout
the latest r13 version.
In toolchain/gcc/build-gcc.sh
, find the line that contains:
ENABLE_LANGUAGES="c,c++"
and replace it with:
ENABLE_LANGUAGES="c,c++,fortran"
If you are planning to build the ARM or AArch64 toolchains for Linux 64-bit
or Windows 32-bit, that shoule be sufficient.
Simply call build.py
under toolchain/gcc
which will take care of everything.
You can specify which toolchain to build. For instance:
./build.py --toolchain arm-linux-androideabi
See ./build.py -h
for possible values.
If nothing is specified, it will build all of them.
When building the toolchain for Windows, add --host windows
(or --host windows64
for 64-bit).
When building the x86 or x86_64 toolchains, additional changes are
required. There is an issue in libgfortran for the x86 and x86_64 targets
(see #2
and this issue)
causing an error when building it. See the x86.diff
.
When building the toolchain for Windows 64-bit,
you need to change toolchain/binutils/binutils-2.25/gold/aarch64.cc
(see #1
and this issue).
Find line 2028 that says:
Insntype adr_insn = adrp_insn & ((1 << 31) - 1);
and replace it by:
Insntype adr_insn = adrp_insn & ((1u << 31) - 1);
The generated toolchain are not standalone as few includes are packaged. This is because NDK lets you choose which platform version and which STL you want to use.
To allow ndk-build
to use your new toolchain, extract the archive
under ndk/toolchains/$(TOOLCHAIN)/prebuilt/$(HOST_ARCH)
.
Don't forget to back up the toolchain that was already packaged with the NDK.
Warning: This refers to the full NDK downloadable from Google,
not the directory created by repo.
For instance, on Linux x86_64 for the AArch64 toolchain, unpack the archive as
ndk/toolchains/aarch64-linux-android-4.9/prebuilt/linux-x86_64
.
If you want to create a standalone toolchains (i.e. you're not
using ndk-build
), do the previous step, and then follow
this guide.
You will want to specify which API level you want to use. It is safe to always
use the latest available, even if you are targetting older devices.