Building V8 and Node.JS

I'm not too familiar with how to go about sending build options through Node.JS's build system to v8, so I'll build them separately with V8 as a shared library.

This process will take an hour or two (mostly wait time) and you probably won't get by without 1.5GB of disk space and 256mb RAM.

If you have a little less than 256mb (say 160mb), you might try adding just a bit of swap temporarily.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/128mb.swp bs=1M count=128
mkswap -f /128mb.swp
swapon /128mb.swp

Note: In the instructions I show how to natively compile V8 and Node.JS for debugging on ARM. The debugging options are rather blatent. If you simply omit them you will have a release system. The CCFLAGS are specific to ARM.

build tools

Odd that you'd have to use one intepreted languaged to compile an intepreter and frontend... but scons and waf are just that way...

opkg install task-sdk-native subversion git
opkg install \
  python \
  python-distutils \
  python-modules \
  python-misc

scons

Browse the scons downloads for the version of your choice.

I'll use the latest production release.

cd ~/
SCONS_VER=2.0.1
wget http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/scons/scons-${SCONS_VER}.tar.gz
tar xf scons-${SCONS_VER}.tar.gz
cd scons-${SCONS_VER}
python setup.py install

V8

cd ~/
svn checkout http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ v8-read-only
cd v8-read-only
DBGFLAGS="-ggdb3 -g3 -O0"
export CCFLAGS="-march=armv7-a -mtune=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -mthumb-interwork -mno-thumb ${DBGFLAGS}"
scons mode=debug snapshot=on library=shared importenv=CCFLAGS
cp libv8_g.so /usr/local/lib

Since this takes such a ridiculously long time, you may wish to tar your build for later use.

Node.JS

cd ~/
NODE_VER=v0.2
git clone git://github.com/ry/node.git
cd node
git checkout ${NODE_VER}

# Node looks for the normal version of v8 as well.
# This is a bug, but easy to work around
cd /usr/local/lib
ln -s libv8_g.so libv8.so

# Note that you can't use a relative path for the include directory
# Note that the '_g' is added automatically, this is common convention for debug files
DBGFLAGS="-ggdb3 -g3 -O0"
export CCFLAGS="-march=armv7-a -mtune=cortex-a8 -mfpu=neon -mfloat-abi=softfp -mthumb-interwork -mno-thumb ${DBGFLAGS}"
./configure \
  --prefix=/usr/local \
  --debug \
  --shared-v8 \
  --shared-v8-includes=/home/root/v8-read-only/include \
  --shared-v8-libpath=/usr/local/lib \
  --shared-v8-libname=v8

make
make install

Debugging

opkg install gdb

First you must create a gdb script (otherwise this gets real old, real fast)

my-test-case.gdb.scr:

run /home/root/tests/my-test-case.js --some args --can=go --here

And then a script to run gdb with the script perhaps

run-my-test-case.sh

#!/bin/sh
cd /home/root/tests/
gdb node --command=./my-test-case.gdb.scr

By AJ ONeal


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