docker-images

Docker images for building portable binaries.

Building Linux binaries from macOS

The x-tools toolchains can also be built natively on macOS, so that a Mac can cross-compile Frida for Linux without Docker. Prebuilt tarballs are published as release assets by the macOS workflow, named like x-tools-x86_64-linux-gnu-macos-arm64.tar.xz.

To build one yourself, with Xcode Command Line Tools and Homebrew installed:

x-tools/scripts/build-toolchain.sh x86_64-linux-gnu

The script installs the Homebrew packages it needs, builds on a case-sensitive sparse disk image under x-tools/build/ (which it mounts at /Volumes/frida-x-tools), and writes the result to x-tools/build/x-tools-x86_64-linux-gnu-macos-arm64.tar.xz. Any other x-tools/configs/*.config name can be given instead of x86_64-linux-gnu.

Install the tarball like the Docker images lay it out, and put it on PATH:

sudo mkdir -p /opt/x-tools
sudo tar -C /opt/x-tools -xJf x-tools/build/x-tools-x86_64-linux-gnu-macos-arm64.tar.xz
export PATH=/opt/x-tools/x86_64-linux-gnu/bin:$PATH

Frida's build system looks up <triplet>-gcc and friends on PATH, so in a Frida checkout you can then do:

./configure --host=x86_64-linux-gnu
make

Unlike the Docker images, the macOS toolchains are built without the gold linker, as it cannot be built on a macOS host. Extracting onto a regular, case-insensitive volume is fine: the only paths that differ by case alone are a handful of Linux 2.6.18 netfilter headers that nothing in Frida uses.