Cross Compiling

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For building arm software check out the Article NixOS on ARM
If you are looking for building 32bit software, check out Packaging/32bit Applications
Quick example to cross compile a package: Cheatsheet#Cross-compile_packages.

Cross-Compiling in nixpkgs unstable (pre-18.09)

A lot has happened in 2018 and now cross-compilation is well supported within the unstable branch of nixpkgs. The basic idea is to use pkgsCross.platform instead of pkgs:

nix build -f channel:nixos-unstable pkgsCross.raspberryPi.emacs

How to specify dependencies

Depending in which if packages are required at build time or at runtime they need to go to different inputs the derivation.

• If it is used at build-time it's depsBuildXXX
  • compiler producing native binaries go to depsBuildBuild
  • compiler producing cross binaries, all setup hooks and programs executed by the builder go to depsBuildHost
    • common examples: pkgconfig, autoreconfHook, makeWrapper, intltool, bison, flex
• If it is used at run-time it's depsHostXXX. [Stack linking doesn't effect this, even if it allows us to forget where things came from.]
  • if it’s an interpreter that will be needed by an installed script, it should go in depsHostTarget.
  • otherwise it is probably only needed at build time and can go in depsBuildHost
• If it is a tool and "acts" (e.g. helps build) on build-time stuff, then it's depsXXXBuild
• If it is a tool and "acts" on run-time stuff, then it's depsXXXHost
• if it is not a tool, it's depsXXX(XXX+1)(build + 1 == host, host +1 == target) for backwards compatibility, use nativeBuildInputs instead of depsBuildHost and buildInputs instead of depsHostTarget.

Source: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/50881#issuecomment-440772499

References

• Nixpkgs manual on cross compiling
• Introduction to Cross Compilation with nix by Matthew Bauer

Additional resources

• 2018-08-03 discussion on #nixos (of chat on Matrix.org)