Re: Gnu tools for ARM Cortex development
- From: John Devereux <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 04 May 2010 22:53:11 +0100
David Brown <david.brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
John Devereux wrote:
David Brown <david.brown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
[...]
For building this sort of thing, I'd recommend using virtual machines
-
install Virtual Box (it's free, and runs on Linux and Windows) and
make your build machines as virtual installations. That way you can
easily try out different distros and keep your test builds isolated
and under control. Sometimes these things work better with particular
versions of particular tools (though gcc should build cleanly with
most tool versions), and with virtual machines for testing you can
avoid messing around with different versions of gcc on your main
machine.
That seems like a lot of work - I just set the PREFIX in the build
script and use that path subsequently in project makefiles. E.g. install
to /opt/arm-elf-4.4.0. You can also set CC before building if you want
to build with a different compiler version.
Nah, Virtual Box machines are very easy once you've tried it a couple
of times. Typical Linux distros install quickly and easy since you've
got no complicated hardware, a fast virtual CD (i.e., an iso file on
your disk), and for this sort of thing you can completely ignore most
user interactive software or configuration (no need to find yourself a
theme that matches your office wallpaper). It is also very easy to
take snapshots, archive your build machines, etc. And when you are
following a how-to that starts "I used Fedora 10..." and you've got
Ubuntu 9.04, you can just make a Fedora 10 machine and save yourself
some work.
VirtualBox is geat - I do Visual C++ development in it on my debian
systen. It is also very good for testing Windows software releases, on
multiple versions of windows and letting you quickly roll back the
installation process each time.
[...]
Lately I've been archiving the entire compiler along with each projects
source code. That is, the stripped toolchain binaries are in a
subdirectory of the project and are put under revision control along
with it. Also there is a compiler build script as part of the project
which can fetch the source code and rebuild the compiler if needed.
That's a good idea - it means you always have access to the tools you
used, even if you later are using a completely different system.
With git doing the revision control it is very fast and compact too.
An alternative here is to do all your builds for a project within a
virtual machine, and archive the entire virtual machine. It takes a
bit more space, but is perhaps the most complete archive of the build
environment.
But will your copy of VirtualBox 10 years from now be able to read
todays virtual machine snapshot? Aha, but you will be able to install a
copy of todays VirtualBox on a new virtual machine, and use that! :)
--
John Devereux
.
- References:
- Gnu tools for ARM Cortex development
- From: Tim Wescott
- Re: Gnu tools for ARM Cortex development
- From: David Brown
- Re: Gnu tools for ARM Cortex development
- From: John Devereux
- Re: Gnu tools for ARM Cortex development
- From: David Brown
- Gnu tools for ARM Cortex development
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