Can I skip cmake compiler tests or avoid "error: unrecognized option '-rdynamic'"

You can skip the compiler checks by adding NONE to your project call:

project(<projectname> NONE)

but this can have pretty far-reaching effects. For full details, run

cmake --help-command project

I'm not familiar with ARM, so this is probably not your best option here. I guess you'd be better to see if there's a way to fix the -rdynamic flag.

EDIT:

It looks like this was identified as a bug which is effectively still unresolved. The comments in the bug report mention adding the following lines as a workaround (presumably before your project call):

set(CMAKE_SHARED_LIBRARY_LINK_C_FLAGS "")
set(CMAKE_SHARED_LIBRARY_LINK_CXX_FLAGS "")

You can set CMAKE_<LANG>_COMPILER_WORKS to true to suppress further compiler checks for that language.

set(CMAKE_C_COMPILER_WORKS 1)

It seems you target actually something else than Linux, so you should tell cmake that you are cross-compiling for the generic case:

SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Generic)

Followed by (optionally, but nice to specify):

SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR arm)
SET(CMAKE_CROSSCOMPILING 1)

However, if you specify (which you likely did because this is stated in a lot of examples online):

SET(CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME Linux)

Then cmake will load the configuration files from (suppose version 2.8) the file:

/usr/share/cmake-2.8/Modules/Platform/Linux.cmake

from which it is likely to load:

/usr/share/cmake-2.8/Modules/Platform/Linux-GNU.cmake

Here the -rdynamic flag is set for historical reasons:

macro(__linux_compiler_gnu lang)
  # We pass this for historical reasons.  Projects may have
  # executables that use dlopen but do not set ENABLE_EXPORTS.
  set(CMAKE_SHARED_LIBRARY_LINK_${lang}_FLAGS "-rdynamic")
endmacro()

Rather than disabling the tests as indeed is done by specifying NONE as the PROJECT argument, it seems setting the CMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME (to something else than Linux, for instance Generic) is what you actually want to do.

If you're just compiling a static library and you want to avoid having CMake test that the compiler can generate binaries, you can set the variable CMAKE_TRY_COMPILE_TARGET_TYPE.

set(CMAKE_TRY_COMPILE_TARGET_TYPE STATIC_LIBRARY)