how to make an application in built(like top, vi , etc ) so that they can be put inside the /system/bin automatically on flashing the kernel and can be accessed from the command prompt.
I tried modifying the Makefile for the my application by looking at the example of top utility but could not find it under /system/bin .
I am not sure if I have included the sources of the file in the Makefile correctly.
You need to start with something that the manufacturer provided. Presumably it's a devKit or something. Most modern dev kits ship with either a MFG provided development environment, kernel, sources, etc. Many are based on Yocto Linux.
You can't just compile a binary locally on your PC with whatever version of GCC you have and have it work on an embedded environment. Chances are it's a different architecture (ARM or Freescale or something). There are ways to cross-compile but is some setup involved. Read about cross compiling here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_compiler
There are development and packaging environments that have been developed by the community but it's not for the faint of heart. In short, start reading: https://www.yoctoproject.org/
Related
I have successfully managed to cross-compile the C Azure IoT SDK for a target device running embedded Linux. The instructions are here : https://github.com/Azure/azure-iot-sdk-c/blob/master/doc/SDK_cross_compile_example.md
The next step is to get a basic application using the SDK running on the target device.
How would one go about doing this? Where are the generated libraries etc. to copy to the sysroot of the target device.
There seems to be only support for Rasberry Pi and generating a new firmware image.
I would recommend that you use the -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=[output path] when you generate your makefiles. Once you have run cmake and make you can then run make install which will copy the generated libraries to the location you chose. You do NOT want to install them into your host's library search path since (presumably) they are built for an incompatible architecture. Having done that the /lib directory will have the libraries that you need to use to build your application. These are static libraries (unless you chose otherwise) so they only need to be linked to your application. They do not need to be on the device. Obviously you will also need to cross compile your application.
There are a couple of things you need to look out for though. Your device will need to have the same version of OpenSSL and curl that you used when you built the SDK. These are dynamic libraries so your application would likely fail at run time if you don't take care of that since there would be a version mismatch.
There is another example of cross-compiling here: https://github.com/Azure/azure-iot-sdk-c/blob/master/doc/Docker_SDK_Cross_Compile.md. This version also builds the prerequisite libraries and has suggestions about how you might also cross compile your application. It uses a Docker container to do this but, even if you don't want to use Docker, it may still help you with your process.
I have cross-compiled a kernel, in an autodidactic manner, on a raspberry pi twice in the past.
This kind of things can sometimes a pain in the ... But fortunately there are some step-by-step tutorials.
So I am wondering whether there are general steps that have to be taken and that are the same on all the embedded systems (rpi, beaglebone, atmega controllers, etc...) in order to successfully cross-compile the kernel and make everything work?
My guess:
1) download the kernel source code
2) generate a .config file (which seems necessary)
3) get into the blue screen to do additional adjustements
with e.g.: make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi- menuconfig
4) compile the kernel:
make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=/usr/bin/arm-linux-gnueabi-
5) put it on the SD card or anything else
Would this be a correct general scheme for any cross-compilation on an embedded system?
Sorry for my ignorance, as I mentioned above I learned it by myself.
I would like to be able to setup a kernel on any embedded device.
Any more information or explanation would be more than welcome! As it seems this kind of things can always be done in multiple manners, it gets me confused.
I'd say your first two steps haven't much to do with cross-compiling. In fact it just comes down to having a cross toolchain targeting your platform correctly installed on your system.
The CROSS_COMPILE make variable of the kernel doesn't do anything other than prepending the string it is set to to any toolchain command (like e.g. gcc for compiling), so if your cross toolchain is installed in your search path, it would be enough to set it to just the desired target triplet with added hyphen, e.g. in your case CROSS_COMPILE=arm-linux-gnueabi-. This would lead to using the command arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc for compiling and so on.
For other embedded devices, you might need different cross toolchains (depending on their architecture), but the general process would indeed stay the same.
I am working on an arm embedded platform based on the Cortex A9, very similar to the hummingboard (http://www.solid-run.com/products/hummingboard/).
I am working on porting over some of our software that was previously running on a beaglebone. Our software is python based but uses some ctypes, an internal c library as well as several python modules and a rabbitmq server. On the beaglebone, setting this up was easy because there is a lot of support and ubuntu based distros that make it simple to install packages.
I have a linaro cross compiler and a uboot and rootfs image given to us by the manufacturer of the platform. Manually cross compiling and building all of our necessary dependencies is turning into quite a headache, as everything has little quirks. I do not have a native development toolchain that can run on the arm device.
I am looking for a simpler way to do some of these tasks. Buildroot sounds like exactly what I need, but I am not sure how I would make it work with an already existing rootfs and toolchain. Unfortunately, I don't know all the details of the rootfs and how the hardware is brought up, so I don't think I can replicate the settings exactly using buildroot.
Another option I was looking into was somehow using the rootfs with QEMU and building a native toolchain to run on it, which would allow me to manually build the dependencies without needing to deal with the headaches of cross compiling.
Any help is very much appreciated. Thanks.
Buildroot is designed to generate an entire rootfs, not to "complement" an existing one. So if you were to use Buildroot, you should get rid of the existing root filesystem, and use the new one generated by Buildroot.
Also, note that if you were happy with the Debian distro running on your BeagleBone, you can also run Debian on your Hummingboard.
I'm about to go through a Micro-Controller project which controls a robotic arm. My problem is that # MS Windows there are MikroElectronica (IDE: MicroC) compile .c to Hex put the hex in Proteus and simulate. Then using a special (PCB) Kit with CD (carries windows software) I would put the microchip and install the hex file or what ever.
First all the respect to Ms but I just hate it! I adore Ubuntu/linux and open-source I need from the experts to tell me in "Steps" how to do the previously mentioned in linux with minimal complications.
The Electrical and Mechanical Engineers along with me always brag about Ms is easy. I want to show them how Computer Science guy uses open-source technology and how strong and reliable it is.
Please help !
You wish to demonstrate the power of Linux by trying to run products designed for another operating system on it? Chances are those tools may work in Wine.
Or maybe you can use Hi-Tech C as a compiler and try gEDA for simulation. It is also possible to compile Microchip C30 on Linux if you are working on 16-bit PIC:s. In any case, this may not be as easy as using the out-of the-box Windows tools. It will be more educational, nevertheless.
If you can be flexible and opt for AVR then you will have free GCC compiler and programming tools. All open source and Linux/Mac friendly. More info at www.avrfreaks.com.
Here is a compiler, linker and simulator tutorial for PIC on linux. Here is one that uses SDCC c compiler. Google throws out lots of websites when you search for linux pic.
From my side, I cross-compile and program Microchip dsPIC from Linux but it is not really straightforward. Here are the big steps
First I built the C30 toolchain from Microchip sources (you need to apply a few patches on the given sources for it to compile).
Once you have the toolchain binaries, you will need to have the specific Microchip MCU resources. Those are coming with the C30 installation on a win32. I copied those files from the Windows installation folder onto my linux filesystem.
Here you should be able to compile and link some C & ASM code to a hex file through command line.
Second step, I wanted to build my projects within the Eclipse IDE. To do that we "just" had to write a couple makefiles to call our new C30 toolchain.
Third step, program the .hex onto your microchip MCU. Two ways to do it. If you have a Pickit2, Microchip provides a command line tool to play with it. I personally have an ICD2 programmer. I use the command line tool provided in the Piklab project.
Now I don't have any facility to debug with my ICD2 under Linux.
Now Microchip provides an alternative IDE with "Mplab X" which is based on Netbeans (sick) and should work under Linux and MacOS. But this project seemed to be yet under development, I don't know if it is really usable.
I been looking into Cygwin/Mingw/lcc and I liked to be able to compile perl native C extensions on my windows(preferably under cygwin) and then run them on Solaris and HP unix without any further fuss, is this possible?
This all stems from my original perl cross-platform question here.
(This is a very old question, but missing some useful info --
I've personally done this for Solaris (SPARC & x86), AIX, HP-UX and Linux (x86, x64).)
Getting C++ cross-compiled is much harder than straight C.
HP-UX 32-bit PA-RISC is not supported because it uses SOM format instead of ELF and binutils doesn't (and likely won't ever) support SOM. In other words, you can only cross-compile 64-bit PA-RISC. (Requires PA-RISC 2.0 chip.)
I would go with mingw instead of cygwin, if you can. Cygwin introduces a lot of file permission headaches and cygwin1.dll dependencies that can be troublesome. If possible, however, build on linux. Everything will be much faster because all the tools and scripts you're running are designed for an environment where exec and stat are fast operations. Windows + NTFS is not that environment.
Start with the crosstools script, but be prepared to spend a lot of time on this.
Try with the very latest gcc/binutuils first, but if you can't overcome problems try dropping back to older packages. E.g. for Power3 (AIX) gcc 4.x series cross compiler generates bad code, 3.x is fine.
When copying native libs and headers make sure you are copying from the oldest machine you're likely to run on. Copying a new libc means your code won't run on any machine with an older libc.
When copying native libs and headers you probably want 'tar -h' to turn symlinks into actual files, also watch that on Solaris some requisite crt object files are buried in a cc directory, not under /usr/lib
Cross-compiler are very hard to setup and get working correctly.
Consider that (the people at) NetBSD have to put in a huge amount of work to get cross-compiling to work, and they're running the same OS, just different architectures.
You'd have to, at least, copy all the headers from the other OSs to Windows, and get a cross-compiler, linker etc for the target OS/architecture.
Also that may well not be possible - perl and shared libraries may be compiled with a native/non-gcc compiler which won't be available on Windows at all.
I agree with Douglas, that getting a cross compiler up and working is very hard to do. This is generally, your choice of last resort. If you are boot strapping, or making a binary for an embedded device, then often cross-compiling is your only option. You should be comfortable compiling your own gcc under Cygwin before considering cross compiling. To cross compile, you need to build a gcc to run under windows, but which will create binaries for your execution platform. Sample instructions for doing this can be found here.
Perhaps you are wanting to cross compile because you don't have root and/or can't compile on your target platform. For example, I had a hosting provider which ran Redhat Linux. I could run Perl CGI scripts, and associated modules, but I could not compile on the target machine, and an libraries I built had to exist in my own directory.
To solve this, I could have attempted to cross compile for my target platform, but instead, I decided to setup a similar host inside a VM on Windows. From within Cygwin, you can create a script which ssh's into your VM, copies your source, and does a full configure/build. The last step was to deploy the binary artifact onto my hosted system.
I've successfully had both Solaris 10 and Open Solaris running within a VM on Windows. Unfortunately, you might have a harder time running HPUX under a VM.
Why don't you have a read up on "Grand Unified Builder" (http://lilypond.org/gub/ and http://valentin.villenave.info/The-LilyPond-Report-11 (section #4))
I don't know how it works, but GUB allows the Lilypond developers to compile for about 11 platforms on a linux box.
Compile on Windows then use Wine to run them on any *nix. It works well most of the time.
No, this isn't possible at the binary level. There are so many differences at binary level between the various OSes and CPUs.
But what you can do is make the your C extensions source compatible so that it can compile to different platforms. C was designed as a "portable assembly language". As long as you stick with routines that are cross-platform, then they will usually work the same. You'll still need to test because there could be bugs that exists on particular platform.
This can't be done ... but is it that much of a hassle to recompile the code under Solaris or HP?