Old Dog Learns A New Trick: Cross-compiling Tauri Cli For Risc-v

If you missed the first episode (available here), here's the recap: I tried adding RISC-V builds to Armbian Imager (a Tauri app), hit a wall with 6+ hour QEMU emulation times, and realized the real fix was upstream. Tauri CLI ships pre-built binaries for x64, ARM64, macOS, Windows... but not RISC-V.

My plan was simple: use my physical Banana Pi F3 as a self-hosted GitHub runner. Native RISC-V compilation. No emulation overhead. I'd done this before with Docker builds. Easy.

I wasn't walking into this blind. I already had working RISC-V runners from my Docker-for-RISC-V project:

Two machines at home (192.168.1.185 and 192.168.1.36), both Banana Pi F3 boards, both registered as GitHub runners. They've been churning out Docker engine builds for months. Adding Tauri CLI to the mix seemed natural.

The self-hosted runner approach actually succeeded. Full workflow run, actual binary produced:

I was ready to submit the PR. Self-hosted runners, conditional logic to skip them if not available, fallback to QEMU for the brave souls with 6 hours to spare. A complete solution.

I stared at the screen. Cross? Cross-compilation? I'd just spent an hour in the previous session explaining why cross-compilation was a nightmare for WebKit-dependent projects. Sysroots, symlink hell, version mismatches. I'd tried it. I'd abandoned it.

But FabianLars wasn't talking about manual cross-compilation. He was talking about cross-rs.

Let me say that again, because it bears repeating: I've been doing ARM32 cross-compilation since 2013. I've set up sysroots. I've dealt with qemu-user-static. I've maintained unofficial Node.js builds for exotic architectures. I've built Docker images on physical RISC-V hardware. Twelve years of this.

Cross is a "zero setup" cross compilation tool for Rust. Instead of manually setting up toolchains and sysroots, it uses pre-built Docker containers with everything already configured.

Source: Dev.to