Cross compilation in a Docker container

ebai101

Hey all,

I'm psyched to share this with the community - a Docker development container for Bela.

I was inspired by @thetechnobear 's great work here, but wanted to try and iron out some of the issues that generally arise when setting up a cross compiler. On the suggestion of @giuliomoro I ported xcBela into a Docker environment, and set up a VSCode workspace to make environment quick and easy. This solution has the advantage of being super portable - it should run anywhere that can run Docker, and the VSCode workspace should work on any recent version of VSCode.

The project is in pretty early stages, so there may be some bugs, and a few things aren't implemented yet. I'm very open to contributions - I would love to develop this with the community into a tool that can work for everyone. Would love to hear what everyone thinks!

giuliomoro

nice! does this require to use VSCode or can one use make and vim ?

ebai101

giuliomoro vim isn't on the base image at the moment, but it can be installed from apt normally. The issue would be that it wouldn't survive container reboots, so there needs to be a different tagged image with vim preinstalled.

All VSCode really does is a docker run command with options specified in the devcontainer.json file, and then attaches the editor/integrated terminal to the container. If there was a shell script to run the container with similar options, that would work fine.

ebai101

Just tried this - it does indeed work with vim, make and cmake. I ran docker like this:

docker run \
    -it --rm -w /workspace \
    -e BBB_HOSTNAME=192.168.7.2 \
    --mount source=xc-bela-src,target=/workspace,type=volume \
    --mount source=xc-bela-bashhistory,target=/commandhistory,type=volume \
    --network host --cap-add=SYS_PTRACE --security-opt seccomp=unconfined \
    --entrypoint "/bin/bash" ebai101/xc-bela:latest

Then, just apt-get update && apt-get install vim (or whichever package).

It's probably easiest to add vim to the package list in scripts/build_packages.sh and build the image locally, then just replace ebai101/xc-bela:latest in the above command with whatever you tagged it as. You can change scripts/build_env.sh as well to set up your environment (e.g. clone dotfiles from a repo).

It would be a good idea to have pre-built images set up for vim, emacs and other editors.