Below are some notes on how to build BGL Core for Windows.
The options known to work for building BGL Core on Windows are:
- On Linux, using the Mingw-w64 cross compiler tool chain.
- On Windows, using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) and Mingw-w64.
- On Windows, using Microsoft Visual Studio. See README.md.
Other options which may work, but which have not been extensively tested are (please contribute instructions):
Follow the upstream installation instructions, available here.
The dependencies for cross-compile for Windows x64 + x32 on Linux are already compiled at: /bitgesell/depends/ folder, see codes below to now compile Windows wallets on Linux 18.04:
- x64:
./autogen.sh && ./configure --prefix=`pwd`/depends/x86_64-w64-mingw32 && make -j$(nproc)
- x32:
./autogen.sh && ./configure --prefix=`pwd`/depends/i686-w64-mingw32 && make -j$(nproc)
--
The steps below can be performed on Ubuntu (including in a VM) or WSL. The depends system will also work on other Linux distributions, however the commands for installing the toolchain will be different.
First, install the general dependencies:
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt install build-essential libtool autotools-dev automake pkg-config bsdmainutils curl git
A host toolchain (build-essential
) is necessary because some dependency
packages need to build host utilities that are used in the build process.
See dependencies.md for a complete overview.
If you want to build the windows installer with make deploy
you need NSIS:
sudo apt install nsis
Acquire the source in the usual way:
git clone https://github.com/Original-Tasty/bitgesell.git
cd bitgesell
The first step is to install the mingw-w64 cross-compilation tool chain:
sudo apt install g++-mingw-w64-x86-64-posix
Once the toolchain is installed the build steps are common:
Note that for WSL the BGL Core source path MUST be somewhere in the default mount file system, for example /usr/src/BGL, AND not under /mnt/d/. If this is not the case the dependency autoconf scripts will fail. This means you cannot use a directory that is located directly on the host Windows file system to perform the build.
Additional WSL Note: WSL support for launching Win32 applications
results in Autoconf
configure scripts being able to execute Windows Portable Executable files. This can cause
unexpected behaviour during the build, such as Win32 error dialogs for missing libraries. The recommended approach
is to temporarily disable WSL support for Win32 applications.
Build using:
PATH=$(echo "$PATH" | sed -e 's/:\/mnt.*//g') # strip out problematic Windows %PATH% imported var
sudo bash -c "echo 0 > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/status" # Disable WSL support for Win32 applications.
cd depends
make HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32
cd ..
./autogen.sh
CONFIG_SITE=$PWD/depends/x86_64-w64-mingw32/share/config.site ./configure --prefix=/
make # use "-j N" for N parallel jobs
sudo bash -c "echo 1 > /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/status" # Enable WSL support for Win32 applications.
For further documentation on the depends system see README.md in the depends directory.
After building using the Windows subsystem it can be useful to copy the compiled
executables to a directory on the Windows drive in the same directory structure
as they appear in the release .zip
archive. This can be done in the following
way. This will install to c:\workspace\BGL
, for example:
make install DESTDIR=/mnt/c/workspace/BGL
You can also create an installer using:
make deploy
1: Starting from Ubuntu Xenial 16.04, both the 32 and 64 bit Mingw-w64 packages install two different compiler options to allow a choice between either posix or win32 threads. The default option is win32 threads which is the more efficient since it will result in binary code that links directly with the Windows kernel32.lib. Unfortunately, the headers required to support win32 threads conflict with some of the classes in the C++11 standard library, in particular std::mutex. It's not possible to build the BGL Core code using the win32 version of the Mingw-w64 cross compilers (at least not without modifying headers in the BGL Core source code).