EBC Exercise 08a Cross-Compiling

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This class is about developing software for embedded Linux. The eLinux site is a good source for embedded Linux in general. There are many on going embedded efforts going on many platforms. Poke around the site a while to get a feel for what's happening.

We are going to use the Ångström Distribution. It's available many platforms. Look around the site, you may recognize some of them.

Instructions for building Ångström are given here ; however I'm going to present a Beagle-tuned version of those instructions on this page.

Step 1 - get Open Embedded metadata
First install  by running the following on your host computer. sudo apt-get install git-core

Then run the following to load the meta data. export OETREE="${HOME}/oe" mkdir -p ${OETREE} && cd ${OETREE} git clone git://git.openembedded.org/openembedded.git openembedded cd openembedded git checkout origin/stable/2009 -b stable/2009 The first git transfers some 336,000 object and takes about 18 minutes with the network running at 600 some KiB/s. Keep an eye on it, mine stopped about 23% in and I had to restart it. The second git takes almost no time.

Now run the following to update the metadata: cd ${OETREE}/openembedded git pull You've created a directory called. Go explore around it to see what is there. Be sure to look in. These folders contain instructions on where to get and how to build various things. Look in. Here are instructions for building various Linux kernels. We'll be using. What's the highest version you can find?

Step 2 - Installing bitbake and friends
bitbake is the workhorse that knows where to get everything and how to compile it. The following will install bitbake and additional programs that bitbake needs. This may take 5 minutes. sudo apt-get install bitbake sudo apt-get install g++ sudo apt-get install help2man diffstat texi2html cvs texinfo subversion gawk sudo apt-get autoremove If you are running Ubuntu you will have to also do the following: cd /bin sudo mv sh sh.old sudo ln -s bash sh sudo sh -c "echo 0 > /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr" Finally edit the file  using: sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf Add the following at the end and save. vm.mmap_min_addr = 0 Now you should be ready to run bitbake.
 * 1) This is for bitbake

Step 3 - Setting up for the BeagleBoard
We need a small script to setup the environment, so download source-me.txt to ${OETREE}.

Now let's setup  for our needs: mkdir -p ${OETREE}/build/conf cp ${OETREE}/openembedded/contrib/angstrom/local.conf ${OETREE}/build/conf/ Open  in your favourite editor and add the following to the end of the file. MACHINE ?= "beagleboard" Also, look at this block of lines: PARALLEL_MAKE = "-j4" BB_NUMBER_THREADS = "4" Here you can tell it how many parallel threads to run. If you have several cores on your machine, make this number big. If you have only one core, you might be better performance setting it to 1.
 * 1) Make use of SMP and fast disks

Step 4 - Start building
Do the following... cd ${OETREE} source source-me.txt
 * 1) set environment variables

cd ${OETREE}/openembedded
 * 1) Go to the OE tree

git pull --rebase
 * 1) Make sure it's up to date

bikebake nano
 * 1) Start building

This will take a while. bitbake is installing everything that is needed to compile the system. This includes cross compilers, assemblers, source, everything. I started at 10am and ended around 5:30pm. It was running on just one of the two cores on my laptop. How long did it take on your machine? I notice that an additional 600M of disk space is being used.

Up to this point all we have done is load all the infrastructure needed and compiled the simple nano text editor. We don't even have the kernel yet. Do the following to build a basic console image. This bitbake took 7 hours and 15 minutes. bitbake console-image How did I know to use console-image? I ran the following to find what images were out there: locate image | grep /oe/ This found every file with image in the name it that also had /oe/ in the path. From this I see that oe/openbmebeed/recipes/images has a bunch of files ending in -image. Take a look at console-image.bb and see what you can figure out.

Step 5 Loading your SD card
Check here for details of where to find the build and what to do with it.