Rust Compiling for the Kindle

Background

I wanted to create a weather dashboard for my kindle. There were some existing solutions, but they tend to be super simple or extremely limited.

Instead I wanted something that was:

1. Stable so I could set and forget
2. Information heavy with all my favorite stats
3. Customizable for future use

Naturally, wanting to explore a new language, I chose Rust to acheive these goals. However, I could not find any information on how to compile for it on the kindle!

Solution

After some tinkering and exploring existing binaries, I found which target the Kindle would support and combined it with static linking:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-feature=+crt-static -C opt-level=s -C strip=symbols" cross build --target arm-unknown-linux-musleabi --release

Command Breakdown

• RUSTFLAGS=: Sets compiler flags via environment variable.
  • -C target-feature=+crt-static: Enables static linking to include all dependencies in the binary (no external libraries needed).
  • -C opt-level=s: Optimizes code for smaller file size.
  • -C strip=symbols: Removes debug symbols to make the binary even smaller.
• cross build: Runs the build using the cross tool for easy cross-compilation.
• --target arm-unknown-linux-musleabi: Specifies the build target (ARM architecture, Linux OS, MUSL libc – matches Kindle’s setup).
• --release: Builds in release mode for optimized performance and size.

I used cross to avoid having to deal with a lot of additional pain that arrises from targeting arm-unknown-linux-musleabi. If you know what you’re doing you can simply replace it with cargo.

Final notes

You can find my finished project, here.

I think it’ll be interesting to see if there is a way to create a KUAL extension with this rust compiling in mind. Maybe that is a project for another day. *Update! Check out my new blog post here