Compile native directly on Android phone

This is just a small sneak preview – but it will take a bit to release the whole thing.

I have managed to cross-compile gcc-4.3.5 (and dependencies) for ARM platforms – which allow to directly compile C code on the any ARMv5 (or newer) Android phone.

It is based on buildroot environment and no library dependency exists between it and Android libs. It also uses its own ld.so preloader, meaning that in the future, I would like to have a bunch of Linux tools running directly on the phone, but without the need to have the dependencies statically linked into each environment.

Some outputs:

* Compiling Hello World using the native compiler:

Compiling and ldd command on Android phone

* readelf -A on the native compiler

readelf -A gcc on Android phone

* Output of gcc -v

[root@arc]/sdcard# gcc -v
Using built-in specs.
Target: arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi
Configured with: /home/viulian/buildroot-2010.08/output/toolchain/gcc-4.3.5/configure --prefix=/usr --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu --host=arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi --target=arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi --enable-languages=c --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++ --disable-__cxa_atexit --with-gnu-ld --disable-libssp --disable-multilib --disable-tls --enable-shared --enable-threads --disable-decimal-float --with-float=soft --with-abi=aapcs-linux --with-arch=armv5te --with-tune=xscale --disable-largefile --with-pkgversion='Buildroot 2010.08' --with-bugurl=http://bugs.buildroot.net/ : (reconfigured) /home/viulian/buildroot-2010.08/output/toolchain/gcc-4.3.5/configure --prefix=/usr --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu --host=arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi --target=arm-unknown-linux-uclibcgnueabi --enable-languages=c --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++ --disable-__cxa_atexit --with-gnu-ld --disable-libssp --disable-multilib --disable-tls --enable-shared --enable-threads --disable-decimal-float --with-float=soft --with-abi=aapcs-linux --with-arch=armv5te --with-tune=xscale --disable-largefile --with-pkgversion='Buildroot 2010.08' --with-bugurl=http://bugs.buildroot.net/
Thread model: posix
gcc version 4.3.5 (Buildroot 2010.08)

* Compiling “Hello World” on the phone itself and showing the ldd command executed on the native executable:

[root@arc]/sdcard/work/test# cat hello.c
#include

int main(int argc, char** argv) {
        printf("Hello world!\n");
}
[root@arc]/sdcard/work/test# time gcc hello.c -o /system/var/hello

real    0m0.227s
user    0m0.110s
sys     0m0.060s
[root@arc]/sdcard/work/test# /system/var/hello
Hello world!
[root@arc]/sdcard/work/test# ldd /system/var/hello
        libc.so.0 => /lib/libc.so.0 (0x2aab9000)
        ld-uClibc.so.0 => /lib/ld-uClibc.so.0 (0x2aaab000)
[root@arc]/sdcard/work/test#

I am still testing it, and will release it when ready!