Debian stretch comes with cross-compiler packages for selected architectures:
$ apt-cache search cross-build-essential
crossbuild-essential-arm64 - Informational list of cross-build-essential packages for
crossbuild-essential-armel - ...
crossbuild-essential-armhf - ...
crossbuild-essential-mipsel - ...
crossbuild-essential-powerpc - ...
crossbuild-essential-ppc64el - ...
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Lets have a quick exact steps guide. But first - while you can use do all this in your desktop PC rootfs, it is more wise to contain yourself. Fortunately, Debian comes with a container tool out of box:
sudo debootstrap stretch /var/lib/container/stretch http://deb.debian.org/debian
echo "strech_cross" | sudo tee /var/lib/container/stretch/etc/debian_chroot
sudo systemd-nspawn -D /var/lib/container/stretch
Then we set up cross-building enviroment for arm64 inside the container:
# Tell dpkg we can install arm64
dpkg --add-architecture arm64
# Add src line to make "apt-get source" work
echo "deb-src http://deb.debian.org/debian stretch main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
# Install cross-compiler and other essential build tools
apt install --no-install-recommends build-essential crossbuild-essential-arm64
Now we have a nice build enviroment,
lets choose something more complicated than the usual kernel/BusyBox to cross-build, qemu:
# Get qemu sources from debian
apt-get source qemu
cd qemu-*
# New in stretch: build-dep works in unpacked source tree
apt-get build-dep -a arm64 .
# Cross-build Qemu for arm64
dpkg-buildpackage -aarm64 -j6 -b
Now that works perfectly for Qemu. For other packages, challenges may appear. For example you may have to se "nocheck" flag to skip build-time unit tests. Or some of the build-dependencies may not be multiarch-enabled. So work continues :)
