elebihan.com (Posts about embedded linux)

How to add a Buildroot package for a Cargo crate

Eric Le Bihan — Sat, 23 Apr 2016 14:04:22 GMT

Proper support for Rust and Cargo in Buildroot is available in the "feature/rust" branch of this (personal) Buildroot repository.

In this article, we will explain how to add a Buildroot package for a Cargo crate (namely "hello-rust"). A Cargo package infrastructure may be added in the future, to make the package development easier.

Generating Dynamically Linked Programs with Cargo

Eric Le Bihan — Sat, 02 Apr 2016 18:42:22 GMT

Big, Statically Linked Programs

In a previous article, a Rust program was generated using Cargo: hello-rust.

$ cd $HOME/src/hello-rust
$ stat -c "%s" target/arm-buildroot-linux-gnueabihf/release/hello-rust
218732

The size of the binary file generated is 213 KB. Stripped, it will go down to 115 KB. This is indeed a big "Hello World"! Due to the architecture of the runtime, all I/O handling code is included in any statically linked binary, which is the default for rustc (running strings on the file ends up with a scary result).

Using Cargo with Buildroot (full build)

Eric Le Bihan — Thu, 31 Mar 2016 18:50:01 GMT

Cargo is the official Rust package manager. It will fetch the dependencies of a Rust project and compile everything. Adding support for Cargo in Buildroot will allow the end user to to easily cross-compile programs for an embedded system.

Using Rust with Buildroot (full build)

Eric Le Bihan — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 15:58:11 GMT

In a previous article, we've seen how to add support for the Rust programming language in Buildroot, using the pre-built binaries.

This time, we will add support for Rust by building a cross-compiler in the Buildroot environment. We will use the same example as previously, based on a QEMU ARM Versatile Express system.

Using Rust with Buildroot (pre-built binaries)

Eric Le Bihan — Sat, 19 Mar 2016 16:34:51 GMT

Rust is a modern, compiled, programming language, oriented towards safety, memory control and concurrency. Its performances are comparable to C++.

Rust's features make it a good candidate for writing programs for embedded systems.

In this article, we will build a system for QEMU ARM Vexpress using Buildroot, then add support for Rust by installing the pre-built toolchain in the Buildroot environment. Finally, we will write a test program in Rust, compile it and run it from the generated system.