Embedded Systems Design Europe - April 2008 - (Page 29)

linux will allow you the level of customization, ﬂexibility, and agility that none of the off-the-shelf products can match. Embedded Linux integrated development environment (IDE) software suites are usually available from the same companies that sell embedded Linux. Wind River, MontaVista, TimeSys, LynuxWorks, and a dozen other vendors come to mind. Although these companies will try to sell you both the operating system and the accompanying IDE, this IDE may or may not be tied to that particular distribution. Most of these tools are Eclipsebased and offer similar functionality, which at closer look turns out to be no more than a clumsy editor, compiler wrapper, and debugger. The only exception I’m aware of is Wind River Workbench, which is actually a commercial grade product – not surprising considering Wind River’s experience with its Tornado IDE for VxWorks. The major problem with off-theshelf IDE suites isn’t the software itself, but rather the nature of embedded systems development. To unleash the full power of an IDE, you must run an agent on the target embedded platform, as illustrated in Figure 1. This agent, however, may not be available if you’re working on a customer system, or you may not have enough time to integrate it if you’re doing a relatively short-term project. However, this agent typically fails to run because it relies on some kernel functionality that may not be available, as all embedded platforms are different and embedded systems programmers love to tweak system internals, often breaking some functionality the IDE agent relies on. DO IT YOURSELF The do-it-yourself approach has many advantages, such as the resulting tool is free, not tied to any particular Linux distribution, customized for your needs, and most importantly, it’s modular. This lets you quickly port to a new platform only the functionality that you really need. Now, let’s take a look at the most common development tasks and see how they can be automated and simpliﬁed using open-source tools. We’ll also try to bind it all together to form something similar to IDE, although it’s not really necessary – every tool described here can be used by itself. Note that all network-related examples assume that all networking components reside on the same LAN with a 192.168.0.0/24 subnet; 192.168.0.9 is assumed to be host address and 192.168.0.10 the target. Although everything I will describe can be also done on a Windows host, I recommend using Linux. It’s more convenient, and more tools and utilities are available. And if you rely on a few Windows applications such as Word and Outlook, you can still run them on Linux in emulation using VirtualBox, Wine, or other commercial package. If you’re new to Linux, using a Linux host will also force you to learn the new platform faster. WRITING CODE Many developers have deﬁnite preferences with regard to programming editors, and there are many open-source and commercial Linux packages to choose from. Emacs is my favorite, as it has all the required features (and much more) and most probably will be installed on every Linux host. Emacs is a powerful editor, but it requires a bit of conﬁguration to unleash it’s power. I recommend enabling at least the following options: global font-lock mode for syntax highlighting, imenu-add-menubar-index to show a list of C functions deﬁned in the current ﬁle as a drop-down menu, and cscope (which is a separate package with Emacs integration support) tags for fast search and code browsing. You can either change individual options through Emacs’ Options menu, or just cut and paste the example in Listing 1 into your .emacs ﬁle. I recommend running the compilation process inside Emacs. Having the following keyboard shortcut will make it more convenient: (global-set-key ‘f5 ‘compile) Listing 1 Cut and paste this code into your .emacs ﬁle to enable useful features. (global-font-lock-mode t ) (setq cscope-do-not-update-database t) (setq imenu-sort-function (quote imenu—sort-by-name)) (require ‘xcscope) (add-hook ‘c++-mode-hook ‘imenu-add-menubar-index) (add-hook ‘c-mode-hook ‘imenu-add-menubar-index) Emacs has many other features that a programmer would ﬁnd handy, such as version control integration, autocompletion, matching parentheses, auto-indentation, C macro expansion, gdb debugger integration, and code folding (for further reading, I suggest “Emacs for programmers,” www.linux journal.com/article/2821 and “Us29 www.embedded.com/europe | embedded systems design europe | APRIL 2008 028-029-030-031-032_ESDE.indd 29 10/04/08 14:49:01 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2821 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2821 http://www.embedded.com/europe

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Embedded Systems Design Europe - April 2008

Embedded Systems Design Europe - April 2008 Contents Chip Industry Confronts 'Software' Gap Wind River's VxWorks OS Part of the nEUROn UCAV Demonstrator iSuppli Cuts Electronic Equipment Forecast Study Says GigE Vision Not Mature Chip Aids Wireless Health Monitoring Kontron Reports Strong Financial Growth Xilinx Completes Virtex-5 Line-Up French Project Builds Open Platform Home Automation Group Uses Enocean Radio Layer MIPs Adds Multi-Core Option to Portfolio Cover Feature: Next Gen Programmable Chips: Why Can't Hardware Be More Like Software? Improving Productivity & Quality With Domain-Specific Modeling Efficient CRC Calculation With Minimal Memory Footprint Do-It-Yourself Linux Embedded Development Tools Hardware/Software Verification Enters the Atomic Age New Products Advertising Contacts

Embedded Systems Design Europe - April 2008

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