GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Code-in 2012 BRL-CAD

Compile BRL-CAD with GCC 4.7+ on Raspberry Pi

completed by: Titi

mentors: Sean

BRL-CAD is considered "extensively" portable given our long-standing history of running on everything from embedded systems to desktop systems to massive supercomputers.  We actively seek out new computing platforms to help improve portability.  The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive ($25) computer the size of a credit card that typically runs Linux.  We had a previous task that confirmed BRL-CAD will mostly compile with GCC 4.4 but there were internal compiler errors.

This task involves compiling BRL-CAD on a Raspberry Pi with a newer 4.7+ GCC compiler and running the BRL-CAD benchmark.  WE WILL PROVIDE REMOTE SSH ACCESS to a Raspberry Pi that we've set up on the interview and is  ready to go.

You will be tasked with downloading the BRL-CAD sources from our Subversion repository, running cmake, compiling at least enough of BRL-CAD to run the benchmark (make benchmark), and submitting the resulting benchmark performance log.  If any step fails, you'll be expected to submit a complete transcript of what commands you ran to make sure it's not something simple we can fix or work around.

You will need to compile GCC 4.7+ yourself or it may be available precompiled online (see the references or do a search).

References

  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi
  • http://brlcad.org/wiki/Compiling
  • http://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/1/how-do-i-build-a-gcc-4-7-toolchain-for-cross-compiling
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools.git --depth 1