Cross-compiled ICU4C does not work (all applications exit with code "1")

Question

I am experiencing a problem with ICU4C version 52.

I cross compiled it for TI AM335x board using the toolchain provided by TI (SDK 6.00.00); my development machine is Ubuntu 12.04 LTS 32-bit.

The problem is that when I deploy the library to my target platform and launch any tool (like icuinfo or even any application which rely on ICU, e.g. a QT application) then it exits with code 1 (and no output is produced). If I strace the command, I obtain the output you can find here.

In other words, it seems that somebody is calling exit_group(1) after having loaded libicudata.so.52.

But why? How can I fix the problem?

---

Just for reference, here is how I cross-compiled ICU (maybe I've made some mistakes?):

1) first of all I compiled ICU for my development machine:

./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabihf --prefix=/opt/icu
  --disable-samples --disable-tests --with-cross-build=/opt/icupc

followed by:

make && make install

2) then I cross-compiled ICU: I've set my environment variables AR, CC, CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, LIBS, CPPFLAGS, CXX, CXXFLAGS, CPP for pointing to my cross-compiling toolchain and then:

./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabihf --prefix=/opt/icu
  --with-cross-build=/home/morix/devel/icupc/source

followed by:

make && make install

3) at the end I copied the content of /opt/icu to my target platform and I've tried to run icuinfo, with no luck (as previously described).

Answer 1

I found the solution or at least a workaround.

For a reason that I could not determine, ICU fails to load its data (embedded in libicudata.so.52) at startup (when cross-compiled for ARM using Linaro GCC toolchain).

Digging into ICU documentation I discovered that I could compile ICU to package data in different ways, and I decided to package them in standard files. The configuration of ICU cross-compilation is done this way:

./configure --host=arm-linux-gnueabihf --prefix=/opt/icu
  --disable-samples --disable-tests
  --with-cross-build=/home/morix/devel/icupc/source
  --with-data-packaging=files

At run-time I have then to set my environment variable ICU_DATA to point to the data folders (which in my case is /opt/icu/share/icu/52.1) and the magic is done: ICU runs fine (icuinfo tool terminates with ICU Initialization returned: U_ZERO_ERROR which indicates success).