I absolutely love Intel TBB. I also love the raspberry pi, and use it for work and hobby. Using TBB on raspberry pi and apparently using TBB on ARM in general is not as hard as it seems.

I believe Intel TBB to be the most valuable multi-threaded tool in one’s arsenal as a C++ developer. That’s not to say that you don’t need to understand threads, synchronization tools, deadlocks and MT pitfalls, but the workflow concepts, encapsulations and optimizations given to you for free with TBB are outstanding.

Having said that, I was very disappointed to find out that raspbian does not include a package for TBB, especially since the Pi2 & Pi3 have multi core processors. As it turns out TBB won’t build easily enough on ARM, but that’s not to say that it can’t be done, as we’ll soon see.

IMPORTANT UPDATES (17.07.2021):

1. There is a tbb package for raspberry pi for some time now, simply install it for development with:sudo apt-get install libtbb-dev
2. The opencv in the official packages is already built with tbb and depends on it (the runtime package is called libtbb2).

So how do you build a TBB package for Raspberry Pi?

I recently needed to build TBB for a Pi3 project I was working on. The project required a proper installation of the package – libraries, headers and pkgconfig setup, and I needed to provide it to a customer for installation – so I also created a package for it (yes – you can just take the prebuilt package – link at the bottom). Follow these instructions carefully, mostly using copy paste into a Raspberry Pi terminal. If you’re having problems then see troubleshooting at the end.

Package preparation

Get and unpack the source

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/sites/default/files/software_releases/source/tbb44_20160526oss_src_0.tgz
tar xvf tbb44_20160526oss_src_0.tgz

Build it

cd tbb44_20160526oss
make tbb CXXFLAGS="-DTBB_USE_GCC_BUILTINS=1 -D__TBB_64BIT_ATOMICS=0"

Prepare the package structure

Prepares package structure:

cd ~/Downloads
mkdir libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf
cd libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf
mkdir -p usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
mkdir -p usr/local/include
mkdir DEBIAN

Insert the description (the ^D at the end here is a CTRL-D to end the ‘cat’):

cd ~/Downloads/libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf/DEBIAN
cat > control
Package: libtbb-dev
Priority: extra
Section: universe/libdevel
Maintainer: Your Name <email address>
Architecture: armhf
Version: 4.5-1
Homepage: http://threadingbuildingblocks.org/
Description: parallelism library for C++ - development files
 TBB is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor
 performance without having to be a threading expert. It represents a
 higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details
 and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.
 .
 (Note: if you are a user of the i386 architecture, i.e., 32-bit Intel
 or compatible hardware, this package only supports Pentium4-compatible
 and higher processors.)
 .
 This package includes the TBB headers, libs and pkg-config
^D

Insert the library:

cd ~/Downloads/libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf/usr/local/lib
cp ~/Downloads/tbb44_20160526oss/build/*_release/libtbb.so.2 .
ln -s libtbb.so.2 libtbb.so

Insert the headers:

cd ~/Downloads/tbb44_20160526oss/include
cp -r serial tbb ~/Downloads/libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf/usr/local/include

Insert pkgconfig (the ^D at the end here is a CTRL-D to end the ‘cat’):

cd ~/Downloads/libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig
cat > tbb.pc
# Manually added pkg-config file for tbb - START
prefix=/usr/local
exec_prefix=${prefix}
libdir=${exec_prefix}/lib
includedir=${prefix}/include
Name: tbb
Description: thread building block
Version: 4.4.5
Cflags: -I${includedir} -DTBB_USE_GCC_BUILTINS=1 -D__TBB_64BIT_ATOMICS=0
Libs: -L${libdir} -ltbb
# Manually added pkg-config file for tbb - END
^D

Build the package, with correct ownership:

cd ~/Downloads
sudo chown -R root:staff libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf
sudo dpkg-deb --build libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf

Install the package

sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf.deb
sudo ldconfig

Note that instead of running ldconfig manually you can add DEBIAN/postinst (and DEBIAN/postrm), but it is somewhat of an overkill for this specific post.

Test the package

• Source taken from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-intelthreadbuilding/#list1
• The ^D at the end here is a CTRL-D to end the ‘cat’

cd /tmp
cat > hello_world.cpp
#include "tbb/tbb.h"
#include <iostream>
using namespace tbb;
using namespace std;

class first_task : public task { 
 public: 
 task* execute( ) { 
 cout << "Hello World!\n";
 return NULL;
 }
};

int main( )
{ 
 task_scheduler_init init(task_scheduler_init::automatic);
 first_task& f1 = *new(tbb::task::allocate_root()) first_task( );
 tbb::task::spawn_root_and_wait(f1);
}
^D
g++ hello_world.cpp `pkg-config tbb --cflags --libs`
./a.out

Troubleshooting

See the successful package creation and installation:

Final notes

• If you need you can extract from this some insights on how pkgconfig works and a general simplification of building of packages that don’t have inherit support for linux ‘install’ and/or ‘pkgconfig’.
• A ready package for you to download for Pi3 – https://www.dropbox.com/s/qj0kzoqfn3rw3op/libtbb-dev_4.5-1_armhf.deb?dl=0
• Intel TBB site at https://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/
• UPDATE: See more on using OpenCV with TBB at https://www.theimpossiblecode.com/blog/faster-opencv-smiles-tbb.

That’s all for today.

See you soon in an upcoming post.