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hypriot / golang-armbuilds

Pre-compiled GOLANG tarballs for ARM devices.
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golang-armbuilds

Pre-compiled GOLANG tarballs for ARM devices.

In this repo we'd like to document all steps how to compile the GOLANG compiler from source and package the results as pre-compiled tarballs. So everyone can easily reproduce these steps on a bare ARM Linux machine without the need of having Go already installed. You can use this informations to compile Go on all different CPU architectures as well.

To make a developers live even easier, we're providing in the release section all pre-compiled Go tarballs for all supported ARM versions:

How to install and use a pre-compiled GOLANG tarball

Just download the correct tarball for your ARM CPU from the release section and install it to /usr/local/go, set the PATH env variable and you can instantly start to compile your Go programs.

tar -xvzf go1.5.1.linux-armv7.tar.gz -C /usr/local
export PATH=/usr/local/go/bin:$PATH

Now let's test if it works.

which go
/usr/local/go/bin/go

go version
go version go1.5.1 linux/arm

Don't forget to set the PATH env variable within your ~/.bashrc or ~/.profile as well for your Linux user account.
You can use this code snipped:

# set PATH so it includes GO bin if it exists
if [ -d "/usr/local/go/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="/usr/local/go/bin:$PATH"
fi

How to create a pre-compiled GOLANG 1.4 tarball

Unfortunately there are no pre-compiled GOLANG tarballs for ARM officially available yet and the preferred way to build such a tarball from source isn't well documented at all.

This is a simple approach to compile Go from source and package it as a tarball. This tarball should work like the official tarballs from the GOLANG download page. For the sake of simplicity this build steps are meant to be used on a freshly installed Linux distro on any ARM machine.

Please feel free to use this build recipe and report any issues AND when you could successfully build Go on a new machine. And don't forget to send us this informations so we can include this machine to the list of supported devices!

1. Prepare the build machine

Just install all necessary packages, for details see the official guide Installing Go from source. At least you'll need gcc to compile Go 1.4 from source and additionally curl and git.

For a Scaleway C1 server (Ubuntu 15.04): ARMv7

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential

For a Raspberry Pi A, A+, B, B+ (HypriotOS 0.6.1 "hector"): ARMv6
For a Raspberry Pi 2B (HypriotOS 0.6.1 "hector"): ARMv7

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential

For a Nvidia Jetson TK1 (Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS): ARMv7

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential

2. Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/hypriot/golang-armbuilds.git
cd golang-armbuilds

3. Run the compile script

Here you can easily parameterize your build with GOARM (5, 6, 7. Default=7) and GO_VERSION (1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3. Default=1.4.3) variables.

./make-tarball-go1.4.sh |& tee make-tarball-go1.4.3-armv7.log

export GO_VERSION=1.4.2 && ./make-tarball-go1.4.sh |& tee make-tarball-go${GO_VERSION}-armv7.log

export GOARM=5 GO_VERSION=1.4.1 && ./make-tarball-go1.4.sh |& tee make-tarball-go${GO_VERSION}-armv${GOARM}.log

While compiling GOLANG from source all the tests will be run by default, which will take a lot of time. If you'd just like to create the binary tarball without actually running the full test suite, you can easily skip the tests by setting the env variable SKIP_TESTS to anything.

export SKIP_TESTS=1

On some of the Linux ARM devices the tests are failing! So keep this option in mind and deactivate testing.

4. Use it directly or upload the created tarball to GitHub releases

go1.4.3.linux-armv5.tar.gz
go1.4.3.linux-armv6.tar.gz
go1.4.3.linux-armv7.tar.gz

How to create a pre-compiled GOLANG 1.5 tarball

In order to build Go 1.5 from source, we need to have at least a Go 1.4 version installed on our dev machine and additionally curl and git. For this reason we just install our pre-compiled Go 1.4 tarball and use it to bootstrap Go 1.5 with it.

1. Prepare the build machine

Just install all necessary packages, for details see the official guide Installing Go from source.

For a Scaleway C1 server (Ubuntu 15.04): ARMv7

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential

For a Raspberry Pi A, A+, B, B+ (HypriotOS 0.6.1 "hector"): ARMv6
For a Raspberry Pi 2B (HypriotOS 0.6.1 "hector"): ARMv7

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential

For a Nvidia Jetson TK1 (Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS): ARMv7

apt-get update
apt-get install -y build-essential

2. Clone this repo

git clone https://github.com/hypriot/golang-armbuilds.git
cd golang-armbuilds

3. Run the compile script

Here you can easily parameterize your build with GOARM (5, 6, 7. Default=7) and GO_VERSION (1.5, 1.5.1. Default=1.5.1) variables.

For bootstrapping Go1.5 we need to install Go1.4 first, which is also able to parameterize with GO_BOOTSTRAP_GOARM (5, 6, 7. Default=7) and GO_BOOTSTRAP_VERSION (1.4, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3. Default=1.4.3).

export GOARM=5 && ./make-tarball-go1.5.sh |& tee make-tarball-go1.5.1-armv${GOARM}.log
export GOARM=6 && ./make-tarball-go1.5.sh |& tee make-tarball-go1.5.1-armv${GOARM}.log
export GOARM=7 && ./make-tarball-go1.5.sh |& tee make-tarball-go1.5.1-armv${GOARM}.log

4. Use it directly or upload the created tarball to GitHub releases

go1.5.1.linux-armv5.tar.gz
go1.5.1.linux-armv6.tar.gz
go1.5.1.linux-armv7.tar.gz

Building within a Docker container

docker build --build-arg GOARM=7 --build-arg GO_VERSION=1.4.3 -t golang-builder -f Dockerfile.arm .
docker run --rm golang-builder tar cf - go1.4.3.linux-armv7.tar.gz | tar xvf -

How to bootstrap a GOLANG 1.5 tarball for ARM64 and PPC64

As there is no Go 1.4 support for ARM64 or PPC64 available, the process to compile Go 1.5 on these platforms is a little bit different. But luckily Dave Cheney provided an easy to follow tutorial how to bootstrap a Go 1.5.1 tarball on OSX or Intel Linux. As we are working mostly on ARM, we just used the same steps on an ARMv7 machine.

1. Create a bootstrap tarball for ARM64 on an ARMv7 machine

Everything is available as a shell script, so it's damn easy to reproduce. But you can find the generated bootstrap tarball for ARM64 as well as the log file from this script in the release section.

time ./bootstrap-tarball-go1.5.1-arm64.sh | tee bootstrap-tarball-go1.5.1-arm64.log
ls -al *arm64*
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu    11917 Jan  2 15:20 bootstrap-tarball-go1.5.1-arm64.log
-rwxrwxr-x 1 ubuntu ubuntu     1353 Jan  2 15:08 bootstrap-tarball-go1.5.1-arm64.sh
-rw-rw-r-- 1 ubuntu ubuntu 45354608 Jan  2 15:20 go-linux-arm64-bootstrap.tbz

2. Use the bootstrap tarball on an ARM64 machine to create a pre-compiled GOLANG 1.5 tarball

To decompress the bootstrap tarball go-linux-arm64-bootstrap.tbz we need to install bzip2 first.

sudo apt-get install -y bzip2

Now let's compile Go 1.5.1 natively on ARM64 using the bootstrap tarball we have already created on ARMv7.

time SKIP_TESTS=1 ./make-tarball-go1.5-arm64.sh

Known issues

On Scaleway one of the GOLANG tests are already failing:

--- FAIL: TestFilePacketConn (0.01s)
    file_test.go:121: WriteTo failed: write ip: bad address
FAIL
FAIL    net 3.108s

This failure seems to be already documented in https://github.com/golang/go/issues/10730.

TODO

Additional sources for building GOLANG on ARM

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to the GOLANG team at Google and all maintainers and contributers.