My Raspberry Pi is old, like second gen Model B. In terms of computational power, it pales in comparison to the system it sits next to: a dual xeon hexcore running at more than 4x clock ccyles per CPU. I’ve had it for so long in stand by I forgot the hardward details of it. Luckly Ozzmaker published how to get the info. There is a table at the bottom where you can match your hardware revision from to find the model you are using. The Pi B 2.0 runs ARMv6l with hardware floating point, or at least that is my theory right now. I’ll have to test that once I get the compiler up and running.

I know there are tool chains out there to cross compile. While I was building my microkernel I use to hand compile these. It was slow and error proned. It would be nice to avoid hours long compilation for my Raspberry Pi’s software if I could use the workstation. This should cut the compilation time significantly.

First nice path would be to install the tools through Ubuntu’s package management system. This led me through a rabbit hole of development packages the cross compliation tools wanted to install, including removing libc-dev-i386. This was the path suggested by Hackaday. Since this was the first serious approach I was excited but sad.

There was a lot of talk on StackOverflow without any luck.

On the third or fourth page I journied across Videgro’s method. Fairly straight forward approach of using the Raspberry Pi’s precompile tool chain. Clone from the repository then use arm-bcm2708/arm-bcm2708hardfp-linux-gnueabi/bin/arm-bcm2708hardfp-linux-gnueabi-gcc as your GCC driver.