As we seen in our previous post, “How to Compile and Install device-tree-compiler (DTC) On Ubuntu” , we could compile DTC ( Device Tree Compiler ) for Host machine i.e. Ubuntu In this post, we will describe what changes are required to get the DTC compiled to execute on embedded targets such as ARM. Since executing dtc on embedded targets is required very few times, we will get it statically compiled so we dont need to resolve the runtime library linking issues.

Command line execution

Terminalbash
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/dtc/dtc.git Assuming you have the toolchain and your GCC is something like “arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc” OR you can install the toolchain as, $ sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi once you installed toolchain, modify Makefile as, $ cd dtc $ vim Makefile CC=arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc CFLAGS = -g -Os $(SHAREDLIB_CFLAGS) -Werror $(WARNINGS) -static $ file dtc dtc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=024c7cafca22f3477e9266a293f98fcd82deb5c9, with debug_info, not stripped Note: while compilation, you may get an error as below, but you can ignore this, as our main aim was to get DTC statically compiled which has been done with above changes and steps. /usr/lib/gcc-cross/arm-linux-gnueabi/7/../../../../arm-linux-gnueabi/bin/ld: attempted static link of dynamic object `libfdt/libfdt-1.6.0.so' collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status Makefile:343: recipe for target 'fdtget' failed make: *** [fdtget] Error 1 Ignore above error.

Implementation details

$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/utils/dtc/dtc.git Assuming you have the toolchain and your GCC is something like “arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc” OR you can install the toolchain as, $ sudo apt-get install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabi once you installed toolchain, modify Makefile as, $ cd dtc $ vim Makefile CC=arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc CFLAGS = -g -Os $(SHAREDLIB_CFLAGS) -Werror $(WARNINGS) -static $ file dtc dtc: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=024c7cafca22f3477e9266a293f98fcd82deb5c9, with debug_info, not stripped Note: while compilation, you may get an error as below, but you can ignore this, as our main aim was to get DTC statically compiled which has been done with above changes and steps. /usr/lib/gcc-cross/arm-linux-gnueabi/7/../../../../arm-linux-gnueabi/bin/ld: attempted static link of dynamic object `libfdt/libfdt-1.6.0.so' collect2: error: ld returned 1 exit status Makefile:343: recipe for target 'fdtget' failed make: *** [fdtget] Error 1 Ignore above error.

Gotchas and common issues

  • Permission checks - verify user access rights and sudo privileges before executing system-level operations.

  • Environment configuration - double-check path variables and dependency versions to prevent runtime failures.

  • Backup safeguards - maintain configuration backups before applying system or database modifications.

Following these steps ensures clean configuration and reliable execution for cross compile static dtc for arm.