Cross-compile for Linux on macOS ARM?

[Jason Han]

Hi, has anyone successfully cross-compiled Chromium for Linux on an OS that isn't Linux? I made attempts to do this on macOS but I hit some roadblocks. This doesn't seem to be officially supported by the Chromium project. Thanks!

[Erik Staab]

Hi Jason,

Can you share more about what roadblocks you hit? What errors did you get and what do you have in your .gclient file and in your args.gn file?

Thanks,

Erik

On Wed, Jul 5, 2023 at 2:47 AM Jason Han <jasone...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi, has anyone successfully cross-compiled Chromium for Linux on an OS that isn't Linux? I made attempts to do this on macOS but I hit some roadblocks. This doesn't seem to be officially supported by the Chromium project. Thanks!

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[Jason Han]

Hi Erik,

Sure! I didn't save the exact error message, but I know GN hit the assert on line 9 in third_party/wayland/BUILD.gn. The line is "assert(is_linux || is_chromeos)".

Then, I tried out a hack where I set "is_linux" to true and "is_mac"/"is_apple" to false and GN was actually able to generate targets. However, running autoninja resulted in a lexing error. I took a look at the generated Ninja file and it contained garbage output, and that's as far as I got.

I've attached my args.gn file here! I successfully used a similar one to build macOS Chromium so I believe the args are okay.

Best,

Jason

[Dirk Pranke]

I would not expect a cross-compile from Mac to Linux to work out of the box. I hacked together a patch at one point that worked, but that was two years ago so it probably needs more work now.

However, your build is targeting an arm64 mac build, which isn't supported and I have no idea if it works at all, so I would expect you to hit more issues there. You also have an unusual bunch of flags set; where did you get all of them from?

-- Dirk

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[Jason Han]

Hi Dirk,

Long story short, most of those flags were from the Thorium browser. Chromium kept crashing in debug and release mode, making it hard to develop, and I couldn't figure out why. I soon figured out that "is_official_build" is all I needed for a performant, non-crash prone build. The rest of the flags are pretty unnecessary and are really there because I was too lazy to spend 3-4 hours recompiling. For this issue, I'm pretty sure you can ignore them though.

Thanks for linking your old patch! I'll try to use it as a reference. When you say arm64 mac builds aren't supported, do you mean cross-compiling arm64 Linux from arm64 mac, or compiling natively for arm64 mac? If it's the latter, I actually got that to work without doing anything special and just following these docs.

Best,

Jason

[Dirk Pranke]

Oh, sorry, that was a typo in my email. I meant to say "arm64 linux build, which isn't supported", i.e., the arm64 linux target. Arm64 mac works fine and is supported (both as target and host).

-- Dirk