Building mjmech software on the rpi 3b+ with bazel

robots,

The first piece I tackled when switching to the Raspberry Pi 3B+ for Super Mega Microbot was building our existing control software.  The software we used for the 2016 Robogames is largely C++ and was built with SCons, https://github.com/mjbots/mjmech/.  For all our previous platforms for both Savage Solder and SMMB, we had just built the software on the device itself, which while a little slow, was certainly convenient and required very little sophistication from the build system.  Raspian is debian based, so this shouldn’t be hard, right?

“apt” was my friend and at least got the compiler and all the build requirements installed.  Then I went to build and discovered that some of our C++ translation units required more than 1G of RAM individually to compile.  Ouch.  That rendered building on the target with the current software infeasible.  Either I could rewrite the software to be less compilation time RAM intensive, or switch to a cross compilation model.

bazel-icon

Building on the platform was always somewhat slow, so I decided to try and take the leap and get a proper cross compilation environment set up.  I’ve done that in SCons before, but it was never pretty, as SCons doesn’t have the best mechanisms for expressing things that need to be built on the host vs the target, and describing any given cross compilation tool chain is always challenging.  Plus SCons itself is slow for any moderately sized project.  Instead, I opted to give bazel (https://bazel.build) a try.  I’ve used it professionally for a while now, and while it is a mixed bag, I am an eternal optimist when it comes to its feature set.  Right now, versus SCons, it can support:

  1. Specifying multiple C++ toolchains
  2. Switching between a single host toolchain and a single target toolchain
  3. Gracefully pulling in external projects controlled by hash
  4. It runs locally very fast, can parallelize across large numbers of cores, and finally has a functioning content addressable cache

The two big features which have seemingly been very close for a long time now, but aren’t quite there yet are:

  1. Remote execution
  2. Arbitrary C++ toolchain configuration within a single build (i.e. build binaries for multiple target platforms as part of a single build)

Next up, I’ll describe how I configured bazel with the cross toolchain necessary to build binaries on the raspberry pi 3 (b+).