Building Chromium for i.MX8M Plus

In order to compile an i.MX8M Plus image with chromium, please follow these steps. Please notice that building Yocto takes around 300GByte of disk storage and requires 64GByte system memory or 32GByte with a tweak to build first rust-native as described below.

These steps were tested on a Ubuntu 22.04 build machine.

Install required packages

sudo apt install flex bison gperf build-essential zlib1g-dev lib32ncurses5-dev \
x11proto-core-dev libx11-dev lib32z1-dev libgl1-mesa-dev tofrodos libxml2-utils \
openssh-server openssh-client uuid uuid-dev zlib1g-dev liblz-dev lzop liblzo2-2 \
liblzo2-dev git-core curl python3 python3-pip python3-pexpect python3-git \
python3-jinja2 u-boot-tools mtd-utils openjdk-8-jdk device-tree-compiler aptitude \
libcurl4-openssl-dev nss-updatedb chrpath texinfo gawk cpio diffstat \
libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libegl1-mesa net-tools libsdl1.2-dev xterm socat \
icedtea-netx-common icedtea-netx python3-markdown android-sdk-libsparse-utils \
xsltproc gcc-multilib g++-multilib subversion libc++-dev libstdc++6 \
libstdc++-12-dev python-is-python3 lz4;

pip3 install pylint

Building from sources

Make sure your git username and email is configured; and then clone the ‘repo’ tool and initialize the sources tree -

mkdir imx-yocto
cd imx-yocto
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo
chmod +x repo
./repo init -u https://github.com/SolidRun/meta-solidrun-arm-imx8 -b kirkstone-imx8m -m sr-imx-5.15.71-2.2.0.xml
./repo sync
DISTRO=fsl-imx-xwayland MACHINE=imx8mpsolidrun EULA=1 source imx-setup-release.sh -b build-xwayland-imx8mpsolidrun

Accept the EULA license agreement by
Now edit the file conf/bblayers.conf and append the following to the end -

BBLAYERS += "${BSPDIR}/sources/meta-solidrun-arm-imx8"

edit the file conf/local.conf and append to it Chromium sources and NXP new github repo sources -

First build rust-native and then imx-image-full. The reason that rust-native is built first since it might fail on systems with less than 64GByte system memory.

If your machine does have available 64GByte system memory you can skip building rust-native and go ahead built imx-image-full directly.

Using Chromium

Once the image was compiled and deployed, you can start the browser simply by running: