Self-serving an ARM build

Mozilla announced the intent to deprecate ARMv7 HF builds of geckodriver in September 2018. This does not mean you can no longer use geckodriver on ARM systems, and this document explains how you can self-service a build for ARMv7 HF.

Assuming you have already checked out central, the steps to cross-compile ARMv7 from a Linux host system is as follows:

1. If you don’t have Rust installed:

   # curl https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh
   

2. Install cross-compiler toolchain:

   # apt install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf libc6-armhf-cross libc6-dev-armhf-cross
   

3. Create a new shell, or to reuse the existing shell:

   source $HOME/.cargo/env
   

4. Install rustc target toolchain:

   % rustup target install armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf
   

5. Put this in testing/geckodriver/.cargo/config:

   [target.armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf]
   linker = "arm-linux-gnueabihf-gcc"
   

6. Build geckodriver from testing/geckodriver:

   % cd testing/geckodriver
   % cargo build --release --target armv7-unknown-linux-gnueabihf