Building

Introduction

This document describes how to build Native Client modules. It is intended for developers who have experience writing, compiling, and linking C and C++ code. If you haven’t read the Native Client Technical Overview and Tutorial, we recommend starting with those.

Target architectures

Portable Native Client (PNaCl) modules are written in C or C++ and compiled into an executable file ending in a .pexe extension using the PNaCl toolchain in the Native Client SDK. Chrome can load pexe files embedded in web pages and execute them as part of a web application.

As explained in the Technical Overview, PNaCl modules are operating-system-independent and processor-independent. The same pexe will run on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and ChromeOS and it will run on x86-32, x86-64, ARM and MIPS processors.

Native Client also supports architecture-specific nexe files. These nexe files are also operating-system-independent, but they are not processor-independent. To support a wide variety of devices you must compile separate versions of your Native Client module for different processors on end-user machines. A manifest file will then specify which version of the module to load based on the end-user’s architecture. The SDK includes a script for generating manifest files called create_nmf.py. This script is located in the pepper_<version>/tools/ directory, meaning under your installed pepper bundle. For examples of how to compile modules for multiple target architectures and how to generate manifest files, see the Makefiles included with the SDK examples.

This section will mostly cover PNaCl, but also describes how to build nexe applications.

C libraries

The PNaCl toolchain uses the newlib C library and can be used to build portable pexe files (using pnacl-clang) or nexe files (using, for example, x86_64-nacl-clang). The Native Client SDK also has a GCC-based toolchain for building nexe files which uses the glibc C library. See Dynamic Linking & Loading with glibc for information about these libraries, including factors to help you decide which to use.

C++ standard libraries

The PNaCl SDK can use either LLVM’s libc++ (the current default) or GCC’s libstdc++ (deprecated). The -stdlib=[libc++|libstdc++] command line argument can be used to choose which standard library to use.

The GCC-based toolchain only has support for GCC’s libstdc++.

C++11 library support is only complete in libc++ but other non-library language features should work regardless of which standard library is used. The -std=gnu++11 command line argument can be used to indicate which C++ language standard to use (-std=c++11 often doesn’t work well because newlib relies on some GNU extensions).

SDK toolchains

The Native Client SDK includes multiple toolchains. It has one PNaCl toolchain and it has multiple GCC-based toolchains that are differentiated by target architectures and C libraries. The single PNaCl toolchain is located in a directory named pepper_<version>/toolchain/<OS_platform>_pnacl, and the GCC-based toolchains are located in directories named pepper_<version>/toolchain/<OS_platform>_<architecture>_<c_library>.

The compilers, linkers, and other tools are located in the bin/ subdirectory in each toolchain. For example, the tools in the Windows SDK for PNaCl has a C++ compiler in toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-clang++.

SDK toolchains versus your hosted toolchain

To build NaCl modules, you must use one of the Native Client toolchains included in the SDK. The SDK toolchains use a variety of techniques to ensure that your NaCl modules comply with the security constraints of the Native Client sandbox.

During development, you have another choice: You can build modules using a standard toolchain, such as the hosted toolchain on your development machine. This can be Visual Studio’s standard compiler, XCode, LLVM, or GNU-based compilers on your development machine. These standard toolchains will not produce executables that comply with the Native Client sandbox security constraints. They are also not portable across operating systems and not portable across different processors. However, using a standard toolchain allows you to develop modules in your favorite IDE and use your favorite debugging and profiling tools. The drawback is that modules compiled in this manner can only run as Pepper (PPAPI) plugins in Chrome. To publish and distribute Native Client modules as part of a web application, you must eventually use a toolchain in the Native Client SDK.

The PNaCl toolchain

The PNaCl toolchain contains modified versions of the tools in the LLVM toolchain, as well as linkers and other tools from binutils. To determine which version of LLVM or binutils the tools are based upon, run the tool with the --version command line flag. These tools are used to compile and link applications into .pexe files. The toolchain also contains a tool to translate a pexe file into a architecture-specific .nexe (e.g., for debugging purposes).

Some of the useful tools include:

pnacl-abicheck

Checks that the pexe follows the PNaCl ABI rules.

pnacl-ar

Creates archives (i.e., static libraries)

pnacl-bcdis

Object dumper for PNaCl bitcode files.

pnacl-clang

C compiler and compiler driver

pnacl-clang++

C++ compiler and compiler driver

pnacl-compress

Compresses a finalized pexe file for deployment.

pnacl-dis

Disassembler for both pexe files and nexe files

pnacl-finalize

Finalizes pexe files for deployment

pnacl-ld

Bitcode linker

pnacl-nm

Lists symbols in bitcode files, native code, and libraries

pnacl-ranlib

Generates a symbol table for archives (i.e., static libraries)

pnacl-translate

Translates a pexe to a native architecture, outside of the browser

For the full list of tools, see the pepper_<version>/toolchain/<platform>_pnacl/bin directory.

Using the PNaCl tools to compile, link, debug, and deploy

To build an application with the PNaCl SDK toolchain, you must compile your code, link it, test and debug it, and then deploy it. This section goes over some examples of how to use the tools.

Compile

To compile a simple application consisting of file1.cc and file2.cc into hello_world.pexe use the pnacl-clang++ tool

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-clang++ \
  file1.cc file2.cc -Inacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/include \
  -Lnacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/Release -o hello_world.pexe \
  -g -O2 -lppapi_cpp -lppapi

The typical application consists of many files. In that case, each file can be compiled separately so that only files that are affected by a change need to be recompiled. To compile an individual file from your application, you must use either the pnacl-clang C compiler, or the pnacl-clang++ C++ compiler. The compiler produces separate bitcode files. For example:

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-clang++ \
  hello_world.cc -Inacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/include -c \
  -o hello_world.o -g -O0

For a description of each command line flag, run pnacl-clang --help. For convenience, here is a description of some of the flags used in the example.

-c

indicates that pnacl-clang++ should only compile an individual file, rather than continue the build process and link together the full application.

-o <output_file>

indicates the output filename.

-g

tells the compiler to include debug information in the result. This debug information can be used during development, and then stripped before actually deploying the application to keep the application’s download size small.

-On

sets the optimization level to n. Use -O0 when debugging, and -O2 or -O3 for deployment.

The main difference between -O2 and -O3 is whether the compiler performs optimizations that involve a space-speed tradeoff. It could be the case that -O3 optimizations are not desirable due to increased pexe download size; you should make your own performance measurements to determine which level of optimization is right for you. When looking at code size, note that what you generally care about is not the size of the pexe produced by pnacl-clang, but the size of the compressed pexe that you upload to the server or to the Chrome Web Store. Optimizations that increase the size of an uncompressed pexe may not increase the size of the compressed pexe very much. You should also verify how optimization level affects on-device translation time, this can be tested locally with pnacl-translate.

-I<directory>

adds a directory to the search path for include files. The SDK has Pepper (PPAPI) headers located at nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/ include, so add that directory when compiling to be able to include the headers.

-mllvm -inline-threshold=n

change how much inlining is performed by LLVM (the default is 225, a smaller value will result in less inlining being performed). The right number to choose is application-specific, you’ll therefore want to experiment with the value that you pass in: you’ll be trading off potential performance with pexe size and on-device translation speed.

Create a static library

The pnacl-ar and pnacl-ranlib tools allow you to create a static library from a set of bitcode files, which can later be linked into the full application.

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-ar cr \
  libfoo.a foo1.o foo2.o foo3.o

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-ranlib libfoo.a

Link the application

The pnacl-clang++ tool is used to compile applications, but it can also be used link together compiled bitcode and libraries into a full application.

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-clang++ \
  -o hello_world.pexe hello_world.o -Lnacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/Debug \
  -lfoo -lppapi_cpp -lppapi

This links the hello world bitcode with the foo library in the example as well as the Debug version of the Pepper libraries which are located in nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/Debug. If you wish to link against the Release version of the Pepper libraries, change the -Lnacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/Debug to -Lnacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/Release.

In a release build you’ll want to pass -O2 to the compiler as well as to the linker to enable link-time optimizations. This reduces the size and increases the performance of the final pexe, and leads to faster downloads and on-device translation.

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-clang++ \
  -o hello_world.pexe hello_world.o -Lnacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/Release \
  -lfoo -lppapi_cpp -lppapi -O2

By default the link step will turn all C++ exceptions into calls to abort() to reduce the size of the final pexe as well as making it translate and run faster. If you want to use C++ exceptions you should use the --pnacl-exceptions=sjlj linker flag as explained in the exception handling section of the C++ language support reference.

Finalizing the pexe for deployment

Typically you would run the application to test it and debug it if needed before deploying. See the running documentation for how to run a PNaCl application, and see the debugging documentation for debugging techniques and workflow. After testing a PNaCl application, you must finalize it. The pnacl-finalize tool handles this.

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-finalize \
  hello_world.pexe -o hello_world.final.pexe

Prior to finalization, the application pexe is stored in a binary format that is subject to change. After finalization, the application pexe is rewritten into a different binary format that is stable and will be supported by future versions of PNaCl. The finalization step also helps minimize the size of your application for distribution by stripping out debug information and other metadata.

Once the application is finalized, be sure to adjust the manifest file to refer to the final version of the application before deployment. The create_nmf.py tool helps generate an .nmf file, but .nmf files can also be written by hand.

Compressing the pexe for deployment

Size compression is an optional step for deployment, and reduces the size of the pexe file that must be transmitted over the wire, resulting in faster download speed. The tool pnacl-compress applies compression strategies that are already built into the stable binary format of a pexe application. As such, compressed pexe files do not need any extra time to be decompressed on the client’s side. All costs are upfront when you call pnacl-compress.

Currently, this tool will compress pexe files by about 25%. However, it is somewhat slow (can take from seconds to minutes on large appications). Hence, this step is optional.

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-compress \
  hello_world.final.pexe

pnacl-compress must be called after a pexe file has been finalized for deployment (via pnacl-finalize). Alternatively, you can apply this step as part of the finalizing step by adding the --compress flag to the pnacl-finalize command line.

This compression step doesn’t replace the gzip compression performed web servers configured for HTTP compression: both compressions are complementary. You’ll want to configure your web server to gzip pexe files: the gzipped version of a compressed pexe file is smaller than the corresponding uncompressed pexe file by 7.5% to 10%.

Object dumping of PNaCl bitcode files

Sometimes you may be interesting in the contents of a PNaCl bitcode file. The tool pnacl-bcdis object dumps the contents of a PNaCl bitcode file. For a description of the output produced by this tool, see Contents Of PNaCl Bitcode Files.

 nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_pnacl/bin/pnacl-bcdis \
   hello_world.final.pexe

The output is the corresponding contents of the given pexe.

The GNU-based toolchains

Besides the PNaCl toolchain, the Native Client SDK also includes modified versions of the tools in the standard GNU toolchain, including the GCC compilers and the linkers and other tools from binutils. These tools only support building nexe files. Run the tool with the --version command line flag to determine the current version of the tools.

Each tool in the toolchain is prefixed with the name of the target architecture. In the toolchain for the ARM target architecture, each tool’s name is preceded by the prefix “arm-nacl-”. In the toolchains for the x86 target architecture, there are actually two versions of each tool—one to build Native Client modules for the x86-32 target architecture, and one to build modules for the x86-64 target architecture. “i686-nacl-” is the prefix for tools used to build 32-bit .nexes, and “x86_64-nacl-” is the prefix for tools used to build 64-bit .nexes.

These prefixes conform to gcc naming standards and make it easy to use tools like autoconf. As an example, you can use i686-nacl-gcc to compile 32-bit .nexes, and x86_64-nacl-gcc to compile 64-bit .nexes. Note that you can typically override a tool’s default target architecture with command line flags, e.g., you can specify x86_64-nacl-gcc -m32 to compile a 32-bit .nexe.

The GNU-based SDK toolchains include the following tools:

• <prefix>addr2line
• <prefix>ar
• <prefix>as
• <prefix>c++
• <prefix>c++filt
• <prefix>cpp
• <prefix>g++
• <prefix>gcc
• <prefix>gcc-4.4.3
• <prefix>gccbug
• <prefix>gcov
• <prefix>gprof
• <prefix>ld
• <prefix>nm
• <prefix>objcopy
• <prefix>objdump
• <prefix>ranlib
• <prefix>readelf
• <prefix>size
• <prefix>strings
• <prefix>strip

Compiling

Compiling files with the GNU-based toolchain is similar to compiling files with the PNaCl-based toolchain, except that the output is architecture specific.

For example, assuming you’re developing on a Windows machine, targeting the x86 architecture you can compile a 32-bit .nexe for the hello_world example with the following command:

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/win_x86_glibc/bin/i686-nacl-gcc \
  hello_world.c -Inacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/include \
  -Lnacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/glibc/Release -o hello_world_x86_32.nexe \
  -m32 -g -O2 -lppapi

To compile a 64-bit .nexe, you can run the same command but use -m64 instead of -m32. Alternatively, you could also use the version of the compiler that targets the x86-64 architecture, i.e., x86_64-nacl-gcc.

You should name executable modules with a .nexe filename extension, regardless of what platform you’re using.

Creating libraries and Linking

Creating libraries and linking with the GNU-based toolchain is similar to doing the same with the PNaCl toolchain. The relevant tools for creating static libraries are <prefix>ar and <prefix>ranlib. Linking can be done with <prefix>g++. See the Dynamic Linking & Loading with glibc section on how to create shared libraries.

Finalizing a nexe for deployment

Unlike the PNaCl toolchain, no separate finalization step is required for nexe files. The nexe files are always in a stable format. However, the nexe file may contain debug information and symbol information which may make the nexe file larger than needed for distribution. To minimize the size of the distributed file, you can run the <prefix>strip tool to strip out debug information.

Using make

This document doesn’t cover how to use make, but if you want to use make to build your Native Client module, you can base your Makefile on the ones in the SDK examples.

The Makefiles for the SDK examples build most of the examples in multiple configurations (using PNaCl vs NaCl, using different C libraries, targeting different architectures, and using different levels of optimization). To select a specific toolchain, set the environment variable TOOLCHAIN to either pnacl, clang-newlib, glibc, or host. To select a specific level of optimization set the environment variable CONFIG to either Debug, or Release. Running make in each example’s directory does one of the following, depending on the setting of the environment variables.

• If TOOLCHAIN=pnacl creates a subdirectory called pnacl;

  • builds a .pexe (architecture-independent Native Client executable) using the newlib library
  • generates a Native Client manifest (.nmf) file for the pnacl version of the example

• If TOOLCHAIN=clang-newlib creates a subdirectory called clang-newlib;

  • builds .nexes for the x86-32, x86-64, and ARM architectures using the nacl-clang toolchain and the newlib C library
  • generates a Native Client manifest (.nmf) file for the clang-newlib version of the example

• If TOOLCHAIN=glibc creates a subdirectory called glibc;

  • builds .nexes for the x86-32, x86-64 and ARM architectures using the glibc library
  • generates a Native Client manifest (.nmf) file for the glibc version of the example

• If TOOLCHAIN=host creates a subdirectory called windows, linux, or mac (depending on your development machine);

  • builds a Pepper plugin (.dll for Windows, .so for Linux/Mac) using the hosted toolchain on your development machine
  • generates a Native Client manifest (.nmf) file for the host Pepper plugin version of the example

Here is how to build the examples with PNaCl in Release mode on Windows. The resulting files for examples/api/audio will be in examples/api/audio/pnacl/Release, and the directory layout is similar for other examples.

set TOOLCHAIN=pnacl
set CONFIG=Release
make

Your Makefile can be simpler since you will not likely want to build so many different configurations of your module. The example Makefiles define numerous variables near the top (e.g., CFLAGS) that make it easy to customize the commands that are executed for your project and the options for each command.

For details on how to use make, see the GNU ‘make’ Manual.

Libraries and header files provided with the SDK

The Native Client SDK includes modified versions of standard toolchain-support libraries, such as libpthread and libc, plus the relevant header files. The standard libraries are located under the /pepper_<version> directory in the following locations:

• PNaCl toolchain: toolchain/<platform>_pnacl/usr/lib
• x86 toolchains: toolchain/<platform>_x86_<c_library>/x86_64-nacl/lib32 and /lib64 (for the 32-bit and 64-bit target architectures, respectively)
• ARM toolchain: toolchain/<platform>_arm_<c_library>/arm-nacl/lib

For example, on Windows, the libraries for the x86-64 architecture in the glibc toolchain are in toolchain/win_x86_glibc/x86_64-nacl/lib64.

The header files are in:

• PNaCl toolchain: toolchain/<platform>_pnacl/le32-nacl/include
• clang newlib toolchains: toolchain/<platform>_pnacl/<arch>-nacl/include
• x86 glibc toolchain: toolchain/<platform>_x86_glibc/x86_64-nacl/include
• ARM glibc toolchain: toolchain/<platform>_arm_glibc/arm-nacl/include

Many other libraries have been ported for use with Native Client; for more information, see the webports project. If you port an open-source library for your own use, we recommend adding it to webports.

Besides the standard libraries, the SDK includes Pepper libraries. The PNaCl Pepper libraries are located in the the nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/pnacl/<Release or Debug> directory. The GNU-based toolchain has Pepper libraries in nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/glibc_<arch>/<Release or Debug> and nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/lib/clang-newlib_<arch>/<Release or Debug>. The libraries provided by the SDK allow the application to use Pepper, as well as convenience libraries to simplify porting an application that uses POSIX functions. Here are descriptions of the Pepper libraries provided in the SDK.

libppapi.a

Implements the Pepper (PPAPI) C interface. Needed for all applications that use Pepper (even C++ applications).

libppapi_cpp.a

Implements the Pepper (PPAPI) C++ interface. Needed by C++ applications that use Pepper.

libppapi_gles2.a

Implements the Pepper (PPAPI) GLES interface. Needed by applications that use the 3D graphics API.

libnacl_io.a

Provides a POSIX layer for NaCl. In particular, the library provides a virtual file system and support for sockets. The virtual file system allows a module to “mount” a given directory tree. Once a module has mounted a file system, it can use standard C library file operations: fopen, fread, fwrite, fseek, and fclose. For more detail, see the header include/nacl_io/nacl_io.h. For an example of how to use nacl_io, see examples/demo/nacl_io_demo.

libppapi_simple.a

Provides a familiar C programming environment by letting a module have a simple main() entry point. The entry point is similar to the standard C main() function, complete with argc and argv[] parameters. For details see include/ppapi_simple/ps.h. For an example of how to use ppapi_simple, see examples/tutorial/using_ppapi_simple.

Troubleshooting

Some common problems, and how to fix them:

“Undefined reference” error

An “undefined reference” error may indicate incorrect link order and/or missing libraries. For example, if you leave out -lppapi when compiling Pepper applications you’ll see a series of undefined reference errors.

One common type of “undefined reference” error is with respect to certain system calls, e.g., “undefined reference to ‘mkdir’”. For security reasons, Native Client does not support a number of system calls. Depending on how your code uses such system calls, you have a few options:

1. Link with the -lnosys flag to provide empty/always-fail versions of unsupported system calls. This will at least get you past the link stage.
2. Find and remove use of the unsupported system calls.
3. Create your own implementation of the unsupported system calls to do something useful for your application.

If your code uses mkdir or other file system calls, you might find the nacl_io library useful. The nacl_io library essentially does option (3) for you: It lets your code use POSIX-like file system calls, and implements the calls using various technologies (e.g., HTML5 file system, read-only filesystems that use URL loaders, or an in-memory filesystem).

Can’t find libraries containing necessary symbols

Here is one way to find the appropriate library for a given symbol:

nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>/toolchain/<platform>_pnacl/bin/pnacl-nm -o \
  nacl_sdk/pepper_<version>toolchain/<platform>_pnacl/usr/lib/*.a | \
  grep <MySymbolName>

PNaCl ABI Verification errors

PNaCl has restrictions on what is supported in bitcode. There is a bitcode ABI verifier which checks that the application conforms to the ABI restrictions, before it is translated and run in the browser. However, it is best to avoid runtime errors for users, so the verifier also runs on the developer’s machine at link time.

For example, the following program which uses 128-bit integers would compile with NaCl GCC for the x86-64 target. However, it is not portable and would not compile with NaCl GCC for the i686 target. With PNaCl, it would fail to pass the ABI verifier:

typedef unsigned int uint128_t __attribute__((mode(TI)));

uint128_t foo(uint128_t x) {
  return x;
}

With PNaCl you would get the following error at link time:

Function foo has disallowed type: i128 (i128)
LLVM ERROR: PNaCl ABI verification failed

When faced with a PNaCl ABI verification error, check the list of features that are not supported by PNaCl. If the problem you face is not listed as restricted, let us know!