I'm trying to cross-compile a gRPC using cmake. I actually managed to do it. Unfortunately my method involves tinkering inside CMakeLists.txt. Problem was that, when I was trying to compile gRPC it was using protobuffer he just compiled. It cannot run ARM compiled executables on x86 machine. I managed to compile it by specifying path to protoc and grpc_cpp_plugin manually in gRPCs main CMakeLists.