Building Qt 5.10 for Raspberry Pi on Debian Stretch

Raspbian based on Debian Stretch comes with an old (5.7.1) version of Qt that is already outdated and missing some features and modules. Afaik there are no up-to-date backports so the only way to get an up to date version version of Qt with all features enabled running on your Pi is to build it yourself. This tutorial explain how to build Qt, a time of writing the latest version in the 5.10 branch, version 5.10.1. These instructions works with 5.11 too.

These instructions will build version of Qt that uses the eglfs interface by default and therefore runs applications fullscreen. You can optionally add X11 and/or Wayland support by installing the required development packages, they are described in the Optional features table below.

Building Qt on the Raspberry Pi is quite straightforward and in short consist of the following steps:

1. Downloading sources
2. Preparing the sources
3. Installing required dependencies
4. Installing optional dependencies
5. Fix for EGL library detection
6. Configuring the build
7. Compiling
8. Installing the build

This tutorial is written for the full source of version 5.10.1 (and works with 5.11.1 too) but any older or later version should work just as well if you have specific needs.

It is fully possible to build only parts using the split up Qt submodule sources packages, but this tutorial will not go into that at this time.

Turotial changelog

As this tutorial elvoes over time, changes are logged here.

• 11.12.2017 - Initial version for Qt 5.10 published
• 27.12.2017 - Fix download links and size
• 11.01.2018 - X11 can be used too
• 18.01.2018 - Fix Pi3 config option. Add VC4 option.
• 26.02.2018 - Mention 5.10.1
• 15.06.2018 - Update to 5.10.1. Add X11 dependencies. Add section about required EGL libraries fix.
• 19.06.2018 - Add more X11 packages, split out pulseaudio & gstreamer, disable pch, add missing path to PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR
• 26.06.2018 - Adjust space requirement as with pch disabled we don't use as much anymore

Storage space and memory requirements

Make sure you have enough disk space free on your on your Pi as building Qt requires a lot of disk space. The unpacked full Qt sources itself takes around 2.4GB, the build result around 625MB and the installation 155MB. A minimum of 8GB SD card is highly recommended. Running out of disk space after hours of compiling can be extremely annoying, trust me.

Compiling Qt takes quite a lot of memory, especially if trying to do a parallel build. Some parts take even too much memory and we need to disable building of them. It is highly recommened to enable swap and also consider adjusting the system/GPU memory-split.

Build Qt for Raspberry Pi

Download the Qt 5.10.1 source archive

Download the single source tar file from download.qt.io, version 5.10.1. The package is quite large, 390MB, so depending on your bandwidth it might take some time to download, grab a coffe or continue with the dependecies while the sources are downloading.

wget http://download.qt.io/official_releases/qt/5.10/5.10.1/single/qt-everywhere-src-5.10.1.tar.xz

Un-tar the source archive

Un-tar the source archive in a suitable location, with enough free space (~2.4GB). This will take 7-8 minutes on a Raspberry Pi 3 and even more on an older model, so go grab of coffe again. You can of course start installation of the build dependecies too.

tar xf qt-everywhere-src-5.10.1.tar.xz

Install required build dependencies

You will need to install plenty of packages to be able to build Qt. Some of the Qt features are optional, for example support for various databases and if you don't need a specific feature you can skip building the support. Or the other way around, if you need a specific feature you might need to install more packages. See the table below for a list of some optional features and the required development packages you need to install. But first, start by updating your package cache so everything is fresh:

apt-get update

Then continue with package installation.

Install required development packages

apt-get install build-essential libfontconfig1-dev libdbus-1-dev libfreetype6-dev libicu-dev libinput-dev libxkbcommon-dev libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libglib2.0-dev libraspberrypi-dev

Install optional development packages

Qt consist of many modules, depending on your needs you might like to install additinal development packages to be able to enable support for these features in Qt. Check the table below for optional features and the required development packages that you need to install for them. Also make sure that the optional feature you need is found and enabled by the configure script by checking the output of configure run.

apt-get install bluez libbluetooth-dev

apt-get install libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-base gstreamer1.0-plugins-good gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad libgstreamer-plugins-bad1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio gstreamer1.0-tools gstreamer1.0-alsa

apt-get install libasound2-dev

apt-get install pulseaudio libpulse-dev

apt-get install libpq-dev libmariadbclient-dev

apt-get install libcups2-dev

apt-get install libwayland-dev

apt-get install libx11-dev libxcb1-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libx11-xcb-dev libxext-dev

apt-get install libatspi-dev

Broadcom EGL library filename fix

On Raspbian Stretch the OpenGL library files have been renamed (1, 2)so that they wouldn't conflict with Mesa installed ones. Unfortunately Qt configure script is still looking for the old names. There are a couple of solutions for this:

1. Run rpi-update and install bleading edge firmware and kernel. Then you are done. (Author had done this and therefor hadn't noticed this issue, sorry about that)
2. Patch the Qt configuration to look for the correct libraries. See QTBUG-62216 for details.
3. Create symlink manually.
   In /opt/vc/lib run:
   sudo ln -s libbrcmEGL.so libEGL.so
   sudo ln -s libbrcmGLESv2.so libGLESv2.so
   sudo ln -s libbrcmOpenVG.so libOpenVG.so
   sudo ln -s libbrcmWFC.so libWFC.so

Create a shadow build directory outside of the Qt source tree

We will build Qt outside of the source tree, this way you can easily have different build version and easily also start over in case of any issues. You build location can be anywhere where there is enough space, for example an USB stick in case you are running out on your SD card. Remember to adjust any paths in the commands.

mkdir build
cd build

Configure the Qt build

For some odd reason Qt insists on being configured for cross-compiling, even when doing a native build. Fortunately we can work around it by specifying a couple of extra parameters to get everything detected properly.
You can choose to build a generic build that will work on all of the various Pi versions or specifc one that is optimized for your specific type of board. Choose one of:

Change the configure option linux-rasp-pi-g++ to any of the above to suit your needs.

Note that we are disabling the qtwebengine and mapboxgl as unfortunately compiling them requires much more memory than any current Pi can provide. If you need these components, then consider doing a cross-compilation or build on the ARM device with more memory available or you can try adding plenty of swap.

If you like, go hand ahead and use any suitable custom prefix instead of /opt/Qt5.10 provided in the example configure command.

Run configure with the following options:

PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig:/usr/share/pkgconfig \
PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR=/ \
../qt-everywhere-src-5.10.1/configure -v -opengl es2 -eglfs -no-gtk \
-device linux-rasp-pi-g++ -device-option CROSS_COMPILE=/usr/bin/ \
-opensource -confirm-license -release -reduce-exports \
-force-pkg-config -no-kms -nomake examples -no-compile-examples -no-pch \
-skip qtwayland -skip qtwebengine -no-feature-geoservices_mapboxgl \
-qt-pcre -ssl -evdev -system-freetype -fontconfig -glib -prefix /opt/Qt5.10

Make sure that the configure script detects Raspberry Pi EGLFS, look for the following output:

QPA backends:
  DirectFB ............................... no
  EGLFS .................................. yes
  EGLFS details:
...
    EGLFS Rasberry Pi .................... yes

Now Qt should be configured properly with all features enabled that we need. If you need some of the optional features, make sure to check the configure result that they where properly detected.

Compile Qt

To compile run:

make

or if you are using any of the quad-core Pis, append the -j4 parameter to build in parallel. Make sure you have proper cooling in this case, the 3+ this should run fine without getting throtled.

The compilation time depends on the components being built, speed of your SD card, etc . You can expect about 2-3 hours on a Raspberry Pi 3 when built with parallel make (make -j4).

Note: It might happen that parallel build needs too much memory, in that case run with just one process or try -j2, -j3

Install the build

The compilation should finnish without any errors, if it does not, double check that you have all the dependecies installed and run configure correctly.

If all is well, install Qt by running

make install

You should now have Qt 5.10 installed in /opt/Qt5.10 ready for use. To configure your Qt project(s) to build with this version run qmake from the installation directory:

/opt/Qt5.10/bin/qmake

You can of course also add it to your PATH.

Choosing platform

As explained in the introduction, this build will default to using the eglfs platform, meaning that no windowing environment is required to run GUI applications. You can choose the platform binaries will run against by suppling the "-platform" paramter when running them.

Enjoy Qt 5.10.1 on your Pi, Happy coding!