Toolchain

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How-To install Armadeus Software Development Kit for Linux/Window$

Contents

Forewords

Before writing your first program or changing some of your system's utilities, you will need to build the tools required to compile them on your Host system (cross compilation). The GNU toolchain will be used.

Lexical

  • Binutils: several GNU utilities to generate executable files
  • Buildroot: set of Makefiles that allow to entirely build embedded Linux systems
  • Busybox: "swiss knife" of the embedded Linux (regroup many common programs in one executable)
  • GCC: GNU C compiler
  • GDB: GNU debugger
  • rootfs (root filesystem): filesystem image which will be installed on your target and used by Linux as root ("/") mountpoint.
  • U-Boot: Bios / Bootloader

Recommended System Requirements

  • HD free space: at least 3GB
  • 1GB RAM is preferable
  • 2GHz processor with a 533MHz FSB
  • High speed Internet connection (1Mbits)

With these settings, you will get a complete toolchain, Linux and the RootFS in about 1h30.

Linux installation

The installation was successfully tested on the following distributions:

  • Debian Sarge (3.1), Etch (4.0) & Lenny (5.0)
  • Fedora Core 3 & 4
  • Fedora 10
  • KUbuntu Edgy Eft (6.10), Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), Hardy Heron (8.04) & Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)
  • Mandriva 2006
  • SuSE 10.1
  • Ubuntu Dapper Drake (6.04), Hardy Heron (8.04) & Intrepid Ibex (8.10)
  • Xubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10)
  • Red Hat Enterprise 5.2

The installation may fail on:

  • Ubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10): tslib fails to build


Prerequisites for Linux installation

Note Note: From here we assume that your Linux system has a make version greater or equal to 3.81. To check it:
$ make -v
GNU Make 3.81
...


Depending on your distribution, some additional packages are required.

Debian/Ubuntu based systems

  • you can use the following command to get them (assuming your userid is allowed to use sudo (execution of commands as root)):
 sudo apt-get install build-essential gcc  g++ autoconf  automake libtool bison flex gettext 
 sudo apt-get install patch subversion texinfo wget git-core
 sudo apt-get install libncurses5 libncurses5-dev
 sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev liblzo2-2 liblzo2-dev
 sudo apt-get install libacl1 libacl1-dev
 sudo apt-get install uuid-dev

Not mandatory but useful to add for compiling some Buildroot packages:

 sudo apt-get install libglib2.0-dev
 sudo apt-get install libnetpbm10-dev   (for fbtest)
Warning Warning: For Ubuntu based systems, the following is now required if your /bin/sh is not pointing to /bin/bash:
 $ ls -al /bin/sh
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 2007-12-08 18:33 /bin/sh -> dash
 $ sudo dpkg-reconfigure dash
     and select no

Indeed dash do not support all the capabilities needed by Buildroot (our build system).


Warning Warning: For Ubuntu 9.10, it is required to patch the target Linux Kernel and use GCC 4.1.x supplied in the distribution:

Go to the Linux Kernel source tree, in the source directory, replace any occurence of the word getline in the file scripts/unifdef.c by anything else like fetchline. In newer versions of the GNU Libc, getline is a standard function. It makes collisions with the function included in the build scripts

 $ sudo rm /usr/bin/gcc
 $ sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.1 /usr/bin/gcc

If you let GCC 4.4.x compile GCC 4.2.x it WILL fail.


Mandriva based systems

  • name of packages are different therefore use the lines hereafter instead (assuming sudo is configured to support root commands):
 sudo urpmi gcc  gcc-c++ make autoconf  automake libtool bison flex gettext 
 sudo urpmi patch subversion texinfo wget git
 sudo urpmi libncurses5 libncurses-devel
 sudo urpmi zlib1-devel liblzo2_2 liblzo-devel
 sudo urpmi libacl1 libacl-devel
 sudo urpmi uuid-dev

Not mandatory but useful to add some Buildroot packages:

 sudo urpmi libglib2.0-devel

RPM-based systems

  • like RedHat, Fedora, CentOS, the following commands should install all the needed prerequisites (assuming root shell):
 yum install gcc gcc-c++ make autoconf automake libtool bison flex gettext
 yum install patch subversion texinfo git wget
 yum install zlib-devel gettext-devel ncurses-devel lzo-devel libacl-devel
 

Not mandatory but useful to add some extra packages:

  yum install glib2-devel  lzo2-devel

Get Armadeus software

 $ tar xjvf armadeus-3.2.tar.bz2
  • If you want the latest snapshot, the whole development tree can now be checked out from the new GIT repository. (SVN repository is no more maintained !!!)
 $ git clone git://armadeus.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/armadeus/armadeus armadeus

A directory named armadeus/ or armadeus-3.2/ will be created on your hard-disk and will contain all the files you need.

Remarks:

Configure SDK options

The first time you compile an Armadeus distribution you have to specify the target to work with.

 $ cd armadeus/  (or armadeus-3.2/)
 $ make apf9328_defconfig

This command reloads the default configuration to support an APF9328 board and automatically start a Buildroot's configuration menu. For the APF27 it would be:

 $ make apf27_defconfig
Note Note: If you ever made changes in the following steps, at any time you can reload the default configuration with make apf9328_defconfig or make apf27_defconfig.


Image:Menuconfig3.png

  • If you are not familiar with Buildroot here are some tips:
    1. you can move the highlighted item with the "up"/"down" arrow keys
    2. with the "left"/"right" arrow keys you can choose between "Select", "Exit" or "Help" buttons
    3. "space"/"enter":
      • selects the currently highlighted item if you are on the "Select" button
      • go back in previous menu if you are on "Exit" button
      • show you some Help for current item if you are on "Help" button
    4. for more Help about Buildroot commands, select "Help" in the main configuration screen
  • In menu:
Target options  ---> 
[*] Armadeus Device Support --->
you can check and change the quantity of RAM available on your Armadeus board. Default value 16MB is just fine with all APF9328 boards, for APF27 it could be either 64MB or 128MB (2 x 64MB) (in that case be sure to select 2 chips of 64MB instead of 1 chip of 128MB).
  • In menu:
Target filesystem options --> 
for each type of filesystems to build, you have the option (also copy the image to...) to copy the binary file to secondary location like your tftp server folder (for example /tftpboot).
Even U-Boot can be copied to a second location (like /tftpboot). You will find the U-Boot options at the end of the list.
  • In menu:
Kernel -->
Destination for linux kernel binaries -->
you will find options to copy Linux to a secondary location (like /tftpboot)
  • You may decrease the compilation time by increasing the number of parallel jobs running simultaneously on your system (the result is not guaranteed). This option is located in
Build Options --->
(1) Number of jobs to run simultaneously
  • During the toolchain/distribution automatic build, a lot of software archives are downloaded from Internet. The downloaded files are put by default in the armadeus/downloads/ directory. If you have several views or plan to build the toolchain several times, we advise you to put all the downloaded files in /local/downloads (for example). This is done by configuring Buildroot to use this directory for all your views. Nevertheless, buildroot will be downloaded separately for each build environment you set up.
Build options  ---> 
(...) Download dir
Image:Build_config_menu_download.png

Image:Build_config_download.png
  • After the build, we advise you too to copy all the files in downloads/ on a removable medium, in case you want to install the development tools on several systems.
  • Now, Exit the configuration tool and save your configuration

Launch build

$ make

The toolchain and the full distribution are automatically built. During this procedure, several files are downloaded from Internet.
Please wait for a while.... it takes at least one hour for the first run!
By default, the downloaded files/tarball are put in the armadeus/downloads/ directory. Please see the previous chapter to know how to optimize that if you plan to build several views.

Enjoy the result

The generated binary files can be found in the subdirectory buildroot/binaries/apfXX/ (where XX is the name of your board):

Please note the new naming convention of binary files and directories

The toolchain and project files share a new naming convention too (YY is 4t for APF9328 and 5te for APF27):

  • buildroot/build_armvYY: contains all non configurable user-space tools
  • buildroot/project_build_armvYY/apfXX: contains all configurable user-space tools: target filesystem, linux, busybox and u-boot...
  • buildroot/toolchain_build_armvYY: cross compilation toolchain

More information is available in the buildroot documentation

  • Note: Previous versions of Armadeus SDK stored the generated binary files at different place buildroot/binaries/armadeus/ and file names did not contained any prefix of board name:
    • u-boot.brec (BRecord image that can be used with the bootstrap, if U-Boot is not installed or not working)
    • u-boot.bin (U-Boot image file for use with U-Boot itself)
    • linux-kernel-2.6.xx-arm.bin (Linux image to use with U-Boot)
    • rootfs.arm.jffs2 (FileSystem/RootFS image to use with U-Boot)
    • rootfs.arm.tar (for an NFS/MMC RootFS)


Window$ installation

There are 3 ways of having Armadeus SDK (Linux based) running on Window$ Hosts:

  • Cygwin (not supported anymore)
  • VMWare
  • VirtualBox / QEmu x86
Note Note: After a performance test with VMWare, it is clear that Cygwin won't be supported anymore. We have observed quite a factor 2 in terms of compilation improvements with VMWare


So, on Window$ Hosts, installing the SDK will summary in:

  • install VMWare or VirtualBox,
  • install a Linux distribution on it (Ubuntu, Mandriva, Fedora, Gentoo,... as you like)
  • and then follow Linux installation steps.


What are VMWare & Virtual Box ?

  • They are virtualization tools able to run a standard Linux distribution on a native Window$ system or Window$ on a Linux native system.
  • VMWare player is free. VMWare desktop (used to create the first virtual system) is available for evaluation. You need it only one time.
  • VirtualBox is a Open Source software.

Be aware that VMWare/VirtualBox will require more disk space than cygwin, because a complete Linux distribution will be installed.

Windows installation with Cygwin (no more used)

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