How to setup Cross Compilation for Arm64

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Hello,

I am looking into cross compiling my ROS kinetic project that run on x64 to arm64. I have been reading several posts and links here and there. What I gathered is that some install rebuild ROS arm64 packages and some build ROS from scratch. My question is how do you install ROS arm64 libs on my Ubuntu Desktop (x64) to be able cross compile my project? I did try dpkg --add-archtecture arm64 and after apt-get update I did try to install ros-kinetix-ros-core. sudo apt-get install ros-kinetix-ros-core:arm64 but this fails. Is this the correct doing it? Or building from source is better way to go. I do not find clear information about this anywhere.

If you are familiar with this could you share except steps you did to get ROS cross compilation working?

Edit: Ok per your request let me explain what I am trying to do in grater detail. I ma doing this first time so I might have wrong assumptions.

As of now I have a ROS Kinetic project that I did build on my Ubuntu 16.04 x64 Desktop. This works just fine. Now what I want to do is cross compile my project my my desktop for arm64. From my reading there are two options

1. Cross compile entire ROS on my desktop for arm64
2. Install already prebuild ROS arm64 packages on my Desktop x64

Before cross compiling entire ROS first I am trying to figure out step 2

For that reason I created new Ubuntu 16.04 x64 VM and now I am trying to install only ROS arm64 on it to cross compile my project. To do this I did read https://wiki.debian.org/Multiarch/HOWTO , https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MultiarchSpec and https://askubuntu.com/questions/52322...

So in my fresh VM here are the steps I took ( http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installat... )

1. sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
2. sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

3. sudo dpkg --add-architecture

   arm64

4. dpkg --print-foreign-architectures

   i386 arm64

5. Modify ros-latest.list in /etc/apt/sources.list.d

   deb [arch=amd64,arm64] http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu xenial main

6. Create arm64-xenial.list in /etc/apt/sources.list.d with contents

   deb [arch=arm64,amd64] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ xenial main restricted universe multiverse
   deb [arch=arm64,amd64] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ xenial-security main restricted universe multiverse
   deb [arch=arm64,amd64] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ xenial-backports main restricted universe multiverse
   deb [arch=arm64,amd64] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports xenial main multiverse universe restricted
   deb [arch=arm64,amd64] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports xenial-updates main multiverse universe
   

   restricted deb [arch=arm64,amd64] http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports xenial-security main multiverse universe restricted

7. sudo apt-get update

8. sudo apt-get install crossbuild-essential-arm64
9. Then I did try to install ros-kinetic-ros-core:arm64

At this point I got these message

# sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ros-base:arm64
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading ...