Cross-compiling V8 for the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is probably the most popular Linux ARM device nowadays (not including the ARM based Android smartphones and tablets) and V8 is the most popular JavaScript engine, so chances are you may want to run (a recent version of) V8 on the Raspberry Pi. Building on the device is an option, but that takes ages. So you will probably want to cross-compile V8 on your powerful Linux workstation instead.

To do this for Raspbian, you'll need to install the cross-compile toolchain first (see this guide for detailed instructions). Assuming that you installed the tools to $HOME/Applications/rpi/tools, run the following command from your V8 checkout:

make AR="$HOME/Applications/rpi/tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-ar" CXX="$HOME/Applications/rpi/tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++" LINK="$HOME/Applications/rpi/tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian/bin/arm-linux-gnueabihf-g++" armv7=false armfloatabi=hard arm

This will build a debug version of the V8 shell in out/arm.debug/d8 and a release version in out/arm.release/d8.