cross compiling gdb for arm with python failed

Question

I want to debug ARM application on devices like Android machine, i prefer to use gdb(ARM version) than gdb with gdbserver to debug, because there is a dashboard , a visual interface for GDB in Python.

It must cooperation with gdb(ARM version) on devices,so i need to cross compiling a ARM version of gdb with python, the command used shows below:

./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabi --target=arm-linux-gnueabi --with-python=/usr/bin

But finally a error message appeared:

configure:8096: checking whether to use python
configure:8098: result: /usr/bin/
configure:8316: checking for python2.7
configure:8334: arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc -o conftest -g -O2   -I/usr/include/python2.7 -I/usr/include/python2.7   conftest.c -ldl -ltermcap -lm    -lpthread -ldl -lutil -lm -lpython2.7 -Xlinker -export-dynamic -Wl,-O1 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions >&5
In file included from /usr/include/python2.7/Python.h:8:0,
                 from conftest.c:50:
/usr/include/python2.7/pyconfig.h:15:52: fatal error: arm-linux-gnueabi/python2.7/pyconfig.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.

Then I find the line 15 in /usr/include/python2.7/pyconfig.h, as below:

# elif defined(__ARM_EABI__) && !defined(__ARM_PCS_VFP)
#include <arm-linux-gnueabi/python2.7/pyconfig.h>

Here is the point, I only have x86_64-linux-gnu/python2.7/pyconfig.h in /usr/include, how can I get the arm-linux-gnueabi/python2.7/pyconfig.h? I already apt-get install python2.7-dev.

Answer 1

I ran into this problem when attempting to cross-compile a python wrapper module built with SWIG, but it looks to me like it will happen to anyone cross compiling python-linked C code on a Debian system.

Apparently the Debian python-dev packages are not set up with the header files to facilitate a cross compile, but it is possible to go get them manually. I'm not sure if this is a python bug or a Debian package bug, and I haven't researched if it applies to other distros.

pyconfig.h sets preprocessor defines to tell the python source code about platform-depended things like endianness and data type sizes, so the proper pyconfig.h is definitely needed to correctly compile python source. Fortunately, the pyconfig.h file should be the only file you need to grab separately, and it is available from the Debian python-dev package for your target platform.

you can download the package file for armeabi or any other architecture from https://packages.debian.org/jessie/libpython2.7-dev and extract the include directory yourself, or you can use the following commands to download the package and copy the proper files for armeabi to /usr/local/include

wget http://security.debian.org/debian-security/pool/updates/main/p/python2.7/libpython2.7-dev_2.7.9-2+deb8u2_armel.deb
dpkg -x libpython2.7-dev_2.7.9-2_armel.deb libpython2.7-dev_2.7.9-2_armel_extracted
sudo cp -r libpython2.7-dev_2.7.9-2_armel_extracted/usr/include/arm-linux-gnueabi/ /usr/local/include/
rm -r libpython2.7-dev_2.7.9-2_armel*

Note that on some cross compilers you will have to add -I /usr/local/include to the compiler options if it does not search this location by default, but to me this is better than modifying /usr/include and risking your changes being wiped out by the OS