Cross compiling php

Question

I'm trying to cross compile php for arm and have good progress but I'm totally stuck where it wants to run the php itself (have no idea why). as it is an arm binary and not intel (my building platform) it won't run:

/bin/sh: /path-to-build/sapi/cli/php: cannot execute binary file

How can I fix this? The configure script understood I'm cross compiling but didn't do anything about it (from configure log):

checking whether the C compiler (/path-to-compiler/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc) is a cross-compiler... yes

I'm compiling php-5.3.6 with configure command line:

export CC=/path-to-cc/arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc
../configure --prefix=/prefix-path/ --host=arm-none-linux-gnueabi
             --disable-libxml --disable-dom --disable-openssl
             --without-iconv --without-openssl --disable-simplexml
             --disable-xml --disable-xmlreader --disable-xmlwriter
             --without-pear --without-sqlite --without-sqlite3
             --disable-pdo --without-pdo-sqlite

Answer 1

I was able to resolve this my own by disabling phar. I hope disabling so much modules won't break something internal.

Answer 2

Build without cross compiling and then, when cross compiling, point to the host version of php by overrididing a variable in the makefile on the command line when running make.

Something like:

make PHP_VAR_NAME=path to php built for host

Answer 3

I managed to compile PHP for arm with the following parameters:

export PATH="$PATH:/toolchains/gnu_cortex-a9_tools/usr/bin" 
export ARCH=arm

configure script:

./configure --build=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --host=arm-linux-uclibcgnueabi --prefix=/usr/arm CC="arm-linux-uclibcgnueabi-gcc --sysroot=/toolchains/gnu_cortex-a9_tools/"  --disable-libxml --disable-dom  --without-iconv --without-openssl --disable-simplexml --disable-xml --disable-xmlreader --disable-xmlwriter --without-pear --without-sqlite3 --disable-pdo --without-pdo-sqlite --disable-phar

followed by

make

Answer 4

I managed to solve similar issue while cross-compiling PHP 5.6.0 by editing Makefile after running configure script. Just replace all occurrences of

$(top_builddir)/$(SAPI_CLI_PATH)

with

/usr/bin/php

Where /usr/bin/php is your host php cli. Make sure it is installed, e.g., sudo apt-get install php5-cli for Debian/Ubuntu.

After doing so phar extension builds fine