Installing NFD on Raspberry Pi from Source

Pi-NDN.md

Introduction

The NFD and it's related tools and software packages can be installed on platforms mentioned in the official NFD documentation. However, a successful installation on constrained hardware like the Raspberry Pi with the official Raspbian OS is tricky and sometimes suggested to perform a cross-compilation and install the generated binaries. Although it's possible to install Ubuntu MATE and install the relevant pre-compiled binaries directly, one might need to go through the painstaking process of the MATE environment setup, and not be able to modify code to test/experiment self-written features.

In this documentation, I will talk about how to perform a step-by-step (as noob as possible) installation of NFD and related software from source on the Raspberry Pi running official Raspbian OS. The trick is two-folds-

• Install Raspbian Lite instead of full Raspbian Stretch with Pixel desktop to save a lot of memory.
• Use clang++ instead of GCC as default compiler to speedup compilation.

The process discussed here has been successfully tested with both Raspberry Pi model 2 and 3b with wireless interface networking.

Prepare the Pi

• Follow official Raspbian installation guide to install Raspbian Lite on the SD card.
• Connect Raspberry Pi with HDMI to an external display, attach power cord and a keyboard.
• Boot into your Pi device.
• Login:
  • default user : pi
  • default password : raspberry
• Prerequisites for Model 2 only
  • Plug in USB Wifi dongle.
  • Follow this tutorial on How to setup usb wifi on Raspberry Pi 2.
  • Reboot Pi using

sudo reboot

• Connect to wifi by using (do a little google for details or follow this)

sudo raspi-config

Installing clang++ compiler

Using clang++ helps speedup the compilation and also helps to avoid memory hogging by gcc and therefore does not require increasing swap memory.

• Follow this article to install clang 8 compiler (not tested with newer version).

Installing NFD and related NDN software

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Prerequisites

Note: minimum boost library requirement is 1.58.

sudo apt-get install git build-essential pkg-config libboost1.62-all-dev \
                     libsqlite3-dev libssl-dev libpcap-dev

Manpage and API docs

Note: I skipped them. Details on how to install are available on NFD installation guide.

sudo apt-get install doxygen graphviz python-sphinx

Download and install ndn-cxx

git clone --recursive https://github.com/named-data/ndn-cxx.git
cd ndn-cxx
CXX=clang++ ./waf configure
./waf
sudo ./waf install
sudo ldconfig

Download and install NFD

git clone --recursive https://github.com/named-data/NFD.git
cd NFD
CXX=clang++ ./waf configure
./waf
sudo ./waf install

After installing NFD from source, you need to create a proper config file. If default location for ./waf configure was used, this can be accomplished by simply copying the sample configuration file:

sudo cp /usr/local/etc/ndn/nfd.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/ndn/nfd.conf

To make NFD properly work, you also need to either disable IPv6 on NFD config file or enable IPv6 probing on Raspberry Pi. I disabled IPv6 in NFD config for now by setting enable_v6 no to all relevant entries.

Install ndn-tools (optional)

git clone --recursive https://github.com/named-data/ndn-tools.git
cd ndn-tools
CXX=clang++ ./waf configure
./waf
sudo ./waf install

Install NDN-routing infoedit tool (optional)

git clone --recursive https://github.com/NDN-Routing/infoedit.git
cd infoedit
make
sudo make install

Note: Edit the Makefile as following:

all: infoedit

infoedit: infoedit.hpp infoedit.cpp
	clang++ -o infoedit -std=c++14 infoedit.cpp -lboost_program_options

install: infoedit
	cp infoedit /usr/local/bin/infoedit

uninstall:
	rm /usr/local/bin/infoedit

Full set of documentation (tutorials + API) in build/docs

./waf docs

Only tutorials in build/docs

./waf sphinx

Only API docs in build/docs/doxygen

./waf doxgyen

General

All other documentations can be found at the official NFD install page.