EBC Exercise 08a Cross-Compiling

This class is about developing software for embedded Linux. The eLinux site is a good source for embedded Linux in general. There are many ongoing 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 If  does not work, you can also try. 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

The Psyco Python JIT compiler should help speed up compilation times at the expense of memory use. It only works on 32-bit systems. To install, use sudo apt-get install python-psyco

Step 3 - Setting up for the BeagleBoard
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. More details are here.
 * 1) Make use of SMP and fast disks
 * PARALLEL_MAKE sets the number "gcc" threads (same as make -j4 at compile time
 * BB_NUMBER_THREADS sets the number of bitbake threads, (one thread can be downloading, while another compiles)

To save you a lot of time, it is useful to disable locale generation for all but the one you need. Add this to local.conf GLIBC_GENERATE_LOCALES = "en_US.UTF-8"
 * Note: This may break the full unstable branch compile of angstrom, (I got to the end when it complained about a local being missing), if you don't understand this disable the locals, as it will cut your compile time in half.

Step 4 - Start building
We need to create a small script to setup the environment

cd ${OETREE} wget -c http://www.angstrom-distribution.org/files/source-me.txt


 * Take a second to read the script, and notice that it configures a download directory, a build directory, and a staging directory. Can you explain why ${PATH} is modified in this script?

Now we are almost ready for compiling cd ${OETREE}/openembedded
 * 1) Go to the OpenEmbedded folder

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

cd ${OETREE} source source-me.txt
 * 1) Set environment variables

bitbake 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.

Step 5 - Building a complete image
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. bitbake console-image This bitbake took 7 hours and 15 minutes. There are now some 7,700 directories with 67,000 files in the   directory. An additional 1.5G of disk space is in use.

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/openembedded/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 6 - Loading your SD card
The output of the bitbake command will ultimately be found under the. In there you can find at least two interesting files: console-image-beagleboard.tar.bz2 uImage-beagleboard.bin The console image represents a full and self-contained file system, *including* a kernel. The uImage-beagleboard.bin is a Linux kernel image suitable for loading by the U-boot bootloader.


 * Rename uImage-beagleboard.bin as uImage and load on your SD as before (ECE597 Getting your Beagle running (precompiled)).
 * Also load console-image-beagleboard.tar.bz2 on the 2nd partition like you did before. Did you notice it untar's very quickly?  Why?
 * Boot and explore. What's there?  What's missing?

Congratulations you've just build Linux from source. Try this: beagleboard login: root root@beagleboard:~# cd /sys/class root@beagleboard:/sys/class# ls -F bdi/         hwmon/        misc/         scsi_generic/ usb_device/ block/       i2c-adapter/  mmc_host/     scsi_host/    usb_endpoint/ bluetooth/   i2c-dev/      mtd/          sound/        usb_host/ bmi/         ieee80211/    net/          spi_master/   usbmon/ display/     input/        regulator/    spidev/       vc/ firmware/    leds/         rtc/          thermal/      vtconsole/ gpio/        mdio_bus/     scsi_device/  tty/ graphics/    mem/          scsi_disk/    ubi/ This is a list of low-level devices on the Beagle that you can access as files. Try: root@beagleboard:/sys/class# cd leds/ root@beagleboard:/sys/class/leds# ls -F beagleboard::usr0@ beagleboard::usr1@ root@beagleboard:/sys/class/leds# cd beagleboard\:\:usr0 root@beagleboard:/sys/devices/platform/leds-gpio/leds/beagleboard::usr0# cat trigger none nand-disk mmc0 mmc1 [heartbeat] This is a list of values you can assign to trigger. Notice LED0 is blinking on and off right now. Try: root@beagleboard:/sys/devices/platform/leds-gpio/leds/beagleboard::usr0# echo none > trigger root@beagleboard:/sys/devices/platform/leds-gpio/leds/beagleboard::usr0# echo 1 > brightness What happens? Play around. Here are instructions on reading the USER switch. Try it. Can you make the LEDs blink in response to the button being pressed?

Step 7 - Building a complete Beagle demo image
Now let's build the how demo we were running before. We'll do this via bitbake, but argument do we give it? Try looking in, do you see a recipe that might work? Hint: It has beagle in the name. Here's what I tried. time bitbake beagle????-image Replace ???? with the recipe name you found. I added the time command so I could see how long it takes to run. My run took some 7.5 hours.