Compiling Haskell on the Raspberry Pi

Question

I am trying to compile GHC 7.6.3 on the Raspberry Pi. The 7.4 version of GHC that ships with Raspbian, does not support ghci. I intend to package v 7.6.3 and make it available. After a looong time, I get this error on the Pi: ``` HC [stage 0] utils/hp2ps/dist/build/Key.o HC [stage 0] utils/hp2ps/dist/build/PsFile.o HC [stage 0] utils/hp2ps/dist/build/Shade.o HC [stage 0] utils/hp2ps/dist/build/Utilities.o "inplace/bin/mkdirhier" utils/hp2ps/dist/build/tmp//. HC [stage 0] utils/hp2ps/dist/build/tmp/hp2ps Warning: -rtsopts and -with-rtsopts have no effect with -no-hs-main. Call hs_init_ghc() from your main() function to set these options. "cp" -p utils/hp2ps/dist/build/tmp/hp2ps inplace/bin/hp2ps cp driver/ghc-usage.txt inplace/lib/ghc-usage.txt cp driver/ghci-usage.txt inplace/lib/ghci-usage.txt HC [stage 0] utils/genapply/dist/build/GenApply.o "inplace/bin/mkdirhier" utils/genapply/dist/build/tmp//. HC [stage 0] utils/genapply/dist/build/tmp/genapply "cp" -p utils/genapply/dist/build/…

Accepted Answer

I got GHC-7.8.3 compiled with Raspberry PI from upstream sources. It's not very fast, but it gets the job done:

```
pi@arlanda ~ $ ghci
GHCi, version 7.8.3: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer-gmp ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
Prelude> 1+1
2
```

Key things are to do the following:

- Have enough memory. Plug in an external hard disk and create a 4-gigabyte swap partition. First in `fdisk` select the partition type to be Linux swap, then do `mkswap /dev/sdXX`, finally do swapon `/dev/sdXX`, where `XX` is the disk id letter and partition number.

- Update kernel to the latest version with `rpi-update` to prevent hangs. I had also `smsc95xx.turbo_mode=N slub_debug=FP` added to the end of kernel command line in `/boot/cmdline.txt` file.

- Install gold linker with `apt-get install binutils-gold`, because regular `ld.bfd` will fail to create the dynamic libraries. The problem is that you can't use `gold` for linking everything, but need to link the stage 1 with `ld.bfd`. You need to follow the instructions in this script (original information from here) with the exception that you need to use `ld.bfd` for running the initial `./configure` call too.

- Have patience -- the compilation will take days.

Compiling Haskell on the Raspberry Pi

Solution

Problem