Eclipse ARM toolchain for the Linux

Hello to all

I have Ubuntu 10.04 linux installed on my Desktop PC and I have an ARM development board for the development of applications for the ARM processors and testing the application on the ARM board.

I searched all the net and what I have got is either the commercial SDK for the ARM or the open source free developement tools for the ARM that also for the windows and not for the linux.

I got one material ARM with Eclipse IDE written by James Lynch, but that too is for the windows environment .

So I want to know that is there any document or blog on the site which tell us that how to make a developement environment for ARM using Eclipse as IDE and all the free GNU toolchains for the ARM.

I have searched a lot and I want th e help from you guys in this direction , So please help me and tell me that how can I make a powerful developement environment for the ARM on my Linux desktop.

Thank you

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Reply to
piyushpandey
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Eclipse is a nice general-purpose tool, and will work with pretty much any set of command-line tools, more or less. It's an excellent fit with gnu tools.

You can get gnu tools for the Arm processor from CodeSourcery. You can pay $$ for a full version, or you can get the free 'CodeSourcery lite' (all the stuff that's under GPL) if you can dig it out of their web site.

You can also do a web search on "summon-arm-toolchain", to find a nice script that'll let you build your own set of tools.

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Tim Wescott

Hello Tim

I understood your point but the codesourcery is not completely free source tool and I want to make the powerful development platform for the ARM using the free GNU tools with the Eclipse IDE.

I searched and I got too but all have the installation procedure for the windows only and please have a look on this site:

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it has the the eclipse gnuarm plugin for the Eclipse IDE which can be only installed on the either windows platform or the MAC platform.

but I want to make the development platform for the Linux, So can you tell me any document or any blog which can help me in this direction.

or do anybody have done it before or ny sort of idea related to this .

Thank you

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Reply to
piyushpandey

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The lack of free downloadable might mean that it's not trivial, but building the gnu toochain from source is not that difficult. Having said that, I think there are several free prebuilt gnu toolchains around for arm, so all you need to do, possibly, is build Eclipse from source. Have you tried to do this, or just assume that it's too much like hard work ?. You pay for convenience etc. Both Rowley and Codesourcery will sell you a supported gnu toolchain, something I would be quite tempted by assuming a good client budget :-). I also like Keil mdk-arm, but very expensive.

I have built both 68k and arm toolchains + Insight to run under Solaris

10, but wouldn't pretend that it was a trivial pursuit. To honest, Eclipse looks far too complex and feature rich for me, when all I want to do is a bit of source level single step debugging. I don't like everything rolled into one package and am still quite happy with command line and makefile, but ymmv...

Regards,

Cheis

Reply to
ChrisQ

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You can get an entirely free pre-built toolchain from CodeSourcery. But one of the things you pay for (and $400, IIRC, for the "personal" license hardly requires a "good" client budget) is ready-made Eclipse integration. If you want to do the Eclipse integration yourself, and don't need the commercial support (which is very good), then CodeSourcery "Lite" editions will be fine.

Reply to
David Brown

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You need to read _all_ my post, not just the first four words:

(A) Codesourcery Lite _is_ altogether free, although you have to _really_ dig for it, and it is not always altogether up to date. Think of it as being the least that they could do to not have the FSF come down on them. I chose to use summon_arm_toolchain because it is more up to date, and you can customize the build a bit.

(B) The summon-arm-toolchain _is_ free, and you _can_ build it, and it works _fine_ with Eclipse (it took me about five minutes to build with it, and maybe 30 to get gdb working). It is _exactly_ what you're asking for, all you have to do is reach out and grab it.

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Tim Wescott

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I don't get this wringing of hands over Eclipse integration. Eclipse comes, by default, ready to understand how to talk to gnu tools. You just have to make a regular old makefile, and set your Eclipse project up as a 'makefile project' -- then it'll work seamlessly, and it takes all of five minutes. It just invokes a command environment with 'make all' as the command, and away you go.

Five minutes is less time than it takes to figure out which "pre made" integration of Eclipse you want to use, for crying out loud!

Yes, setting it up for debug takes longer -- about 30 minutes in my case (after I got openocd working in freestanding configuration). But that's still trivial, and better than slogging through someone else's integration that forces you do do your development strictly according to _their_ 'right' way.

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Tim Wescott

I would guess that if the OP is after GCC, he wants "Eclipse with C/C+

+".

Five minutes? Are you allowing time for a smoke break?

RK

Reply to
GoogleGoonsAreClueless

Ok, but assume that a "personal" license doesn't cover use for commercial development ?.

I do try to stay honest about licensing, especially from small scale vendors, even if it means buying s/user copies via Ebay etc. After all, we are all in the same business. I'm quite happy to do some prototyping with evaluation class tools, but would expect the client to shell out for any serious project based work. That way, more revenue contributes to more funds for ongoing development. While I can build a gnu toolchain, I neither have the knowledge or inclination to really get into tool development in depth. The toolchain is a means to an end here, preferably working out of the box.

I downloaded the Rowley kit for arm and it looks quite good after a very limited play. There's even a Solaris version, but unfortunately, for X86, not for Sparc afaics. Something I have to get in touch to confirm...

Regards,

Chris

Reply to
ChrisQ

I'm slow with this sort of stuff, because I don't do it often. So I have to spelunk a bit through the screens. But you're right -- it's dead easy.

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Tim Wescott

It's gcc+newlib AFAIK, it's fine for commercial development (even the "lite" edition). The paid versions offer support and include other tools.

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John Devereux

Yes, it's fine for commercial development. The tools and main libraries are identical on all the licences. The only differences are the Eclipse integration, the debugger sprites (I think you get more or better ones with the more expensive licenses), some extra sources and debugging symbols for code and libraries that are not fully open source, and of course different levels of support and different priorities for bug fixes, etc.

I wasn't suggesting anything dishonest here - the tools themselves are open source, and you are free to use them. I have in fact bought personal licenses from CodeSourcery and then used the "lite" version for the actual work - the personal license gives me access to support, and gave me a few extra features at the start of the project in question (better debugging), while later on I preferred to use the "lite" version that wasn't locked to a particular machine. With CodeSourcery, you know that the money you pay is going towards improvements in gcc in general, and embedded gcc ports in particular.

Reply to
David Brown

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Sometimes "Eclipse integration" means a bit more than that - wizards or dialog boxes for changing settings, tools for calculating register settings, debugger addons for showing IO registers, support for extra flash programmers, etc.

But more than that, for many people it means they don't have to look at makefiles, or read manual pages for compiler settings, or figure out how openocd works. Personally, I /prefer/ to do it manually like that - I have tried working the "Eclipse integration" way, but I didn't like it much. But I like reading compiler manuals, and I like command-line gdb

- that puts me very much in the minority. If you are starting from a position of ignorance - you maybe don't even know that it is possible to integrate gcc and gdb with Eclipse, never mind knowing how to do it - then spending $400 starts to sound like a bargain.

Reply to
David Brown

I have also used Insight in the past (but not for remote target debugging) and at one time it was the best gdb front end around, but it's development has stagnated over the last couple of years.

Given that it's so tightly integrated with gdb and that you cannot replace the version of gdb supplied with a Insight kit with a later version, this caused me a problem when I needed to move to a gdb 7.x version a couple of months ago.

After looking at what is currently available, and keeping in mind the need for my choice of front end to now support remote debugging (some of the front ends do not), I ended up going with ddd which seems to be a bit dated in terms of functionality but is otherwise working just fine.

I strongly agree with this. I work on Linux and prefer to mix and match my tools to suit my tastes. (For example, my preferred editor is Emacs and going to some IDE based editor doesn't appeal to me at all.)

I also find my command line based workflow to be reasonably efficient and quick.

The OP may want to look at

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whose toolkit patches and build procedures (after tweaking them for my setup) worked just fine when I wanted to build a ARM7TDMI toolchain on Linux a couple of months ago. I don't know if it supports C++; that language was not a factor in my choice of toolchain.

The Yagarto website also talks about Eclipse integration, but that was also of no interest to me so I cannot comment on it.

Simon.

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Reply to
Simon Clubley

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I have swept (or shoveled) up after too many people who were only qualified enough to use an IDE, without having a notion of what make does, or which files need to be archived and which don't, or anything else that keeps a project from hitting the rocks when you need to go into maintenance mode, or resurrect an old version for that one customer too important to upgrade, or whatever.

If you are depending on the IDE for all that knowledge then you are up s**t creek, you just don't know it yet. When the inevitable happens and the IDE fails to deliver the goods, then your paddle has just disappeared. At that point you're almost guaranteed to spend more time flailing with a balky IDE/tools/whatever than you would have to just learn a bit about the tools up front, and that sort of experience nearly always comes at a really awkward time in a software project.

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Tim Wescott

My biggest arguments with IDE's is that each one is different, the editors are generally afterthoughts, and each one wants to impose it's own structure on the code.

Eclipse is always Eclipse, it has an editor that has about 98% of what I want in an editor (being able to select columns of data, as you can do in Codewrite, is really nice but not available in Eclipse), and if I don't get your add-ons then you can't make me do things your way.

And while the best I can say about the debugging interface is that it isn't bad, I have yet to use a debugger that's really _good_.

So I use Eclipse, because I can use it _everywhere_.

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Tim Wescott

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I agree with what you are saying, at least in an ideal world. But unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world.

/I/ know where all the different versions of my tools are, and for each project I do I know what tool versions have been used. If I am going back to an old project, I make sure I use the original tool version, unless I have good reason to move to a newer version or a different tool, with all the extra care and testing that involves. This is one of the benefits of using tools like gcc - it makes copying and archiving different versions easy. And there is no doubt it is easier with command lines tools without bothering with an IDE.

But I know that /most/ programmers - embedded or not - assume that "latest is greatest", and simply upgrade their tools with the latest versions, overwriting old tools. Most programmers use the IDE that came with the tool, and rely on that for project management, compiler settings, etc. They structure their code based on the defaults of the tool and its IDE. They read as little tool documentation as they can.

This is, of course, at least as much a management issue as an engineer issue. But it's a chicken-and-egg problem - most managers don't realise that this is a problem, thus don't deal with it appropriately (by enforcing good procedures, arranging for courses, etc.). And since most developers don't think of this as a problem, they don't ask their managers for the required courses, time, or other resources. No one thinks about it until something goes badly wrong - and that, as you say, it is always at an awkward time.

Of course, it is a different situation for safety-critical or high-value embedded development. Then there are standards to follow, and the company had better make sure they are using the right tools, and using them correctly.

Ultimately, it's all a matter of costs and benefits - people doing development are part of a business. Doing things right takes time and money - it means more courses and education, or hiring more experienced employees that cost more money (and that's assuming you can find such people). It means having the right infrastructure in tools, management, procedures, etc. This all costs money. It will save money in the long term, of course - when things go bad, it can be very expensive. But a company has to make a decision here - should they save on the short-term costs, at the risks of unknown long-term costs?

It also depends on your market. A lot of embedded systems are short term. If the product is going to be replaced by a new model in a year, does it matter if you can't re-compile the code in a year's time?

You don't need a perfect project management system, or perfect developers - you only need "good enough". And a "good enough" programmer with a $400 tool might be better value for money than a "perfect" programmer without that tool.

Reply to
David Brown

I'm not sure that's strictly true. I had a little fun and games building an arm toolchain for Solaris 10, in that some vesrions of gcc, gdb etc wouldn't build, even after a lot of tweaking, so I ended up with a bit of a mish mash of versions. I needed an earlier version of Insight (6.1) because the one of the debug protocols, which I needed to talk to an Embest network debug adapter, (Angel) was removed at some stage. In the end everything works and the thing I do like about Insight is that it's pretty much standalone. I use nedit for editing, gcc command line with makefile for builds and Insight for download and debug. It's still compact enough not to have gained feature bloat and fits in well with the old unix philosophy of one tool for one job. Also have a 68k gcc toolchain for Solaris as well, though without Insight. That target was download to ram and run with no debug, so progress has been made :-).

The above was / is for my own projects. Client work usually gets the budget for Pc based tools, but do like the Solaris 10 cde environment and wish it could be used for all development work...

Regards,

Chris

Reply to
ChrisQ

The Angel stuff is gone?!?!

After all the hours and sweat I put into the RDI and Angel Debugging Protocol stuff, I'm sort of sad knowing it's all been flushed.

The RDI/ADP stuff was rather a kludged together pile of junk, but a few of the kludges and some parts of the junk were mine. IIRC, the Insight GUI didn't work at all well with RDI/ADP before I took a hammer to it.

I still use RDI/ADP occasionally (last time was a couple months ago), but I've got an ancient version of GDB (5.3) laying around for when I need to do that, and I don't use Insight when I do.

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Grant Edwards

I found something in one of the mailing lists about it. I think it was someone at Code Sourcery who proposed it's removal. It was discussed in the mailing list, with the Angel stuff described as "cruft". I did get in touch, but apparently there are no plans to put it back :-(.

Why remove functionality ?. All it does is exclude certain devices without any benefit for those remaining, assuming that the code for each protocol is modular, with standard hooks. I remember being quite hacked off about it at the time, but I guess it does make it easier to sell the overly expensive Abatron kit without competition :-(. There aren't that many network based debug adapters and they all tend to be very expensive. One new to me that looks interesting, from Norway, is the zylin zy1000. The price is not bad as well at around 700 euros. May invest in one later in the year, ongpoing work permitting.

Usual disclaimer etc, web site is:

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Regards,

Chris

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ChrisQ

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