4. Host Computer¶
RTEMS applications are developed using cross-development tools running on a development computer, more often called the host computer. These are typically your desktop machine or a special build server. All RTEMS tools and runtime libraries are built from source on your host machine. The RTEMS Project does not maintain binary builds of the tools. This differs to what you normally experience with host operating systems, and it is, however this approach works well. RTEMS is not a host operating system and it is not a distrbution. Deploying binary packages for every possible host operating system is too big a task for the RTEMS Project and it is not a good use of core developer time. Their time is better spent making RTEMS better and faster.
The RTEMS Project’s aim is to give you complete freedom to decide on the languages used in your project, which version control system, and the build system for your application.
The rule for selecting a computer for a developer is more is better but we do understand there are limits. Projects set up different configurations, some have a development machine per developer while others set up a tightly controlled central build server. RTEMS Ecosystem is flexible and lets you engineer a development environment that suites you. The basic specs are:
- Multicore processor
- 8G bytes RAM
- 256G harddisk
RTEMS makes no demands on graphics.
If you are using a VM or your host computer is not a fast modern machine do not be concerned. The tools may take longer to build than faster hardware however building tools is something you do once. Once the tools and RTEMS is built all your time can be spent writing and developing your application. Over an hour can happen and for the ARM architecture and with all BSPs it can be many hours.
4.1. Host Operating Systems¶
A wide range of host operating systems and hardware can be used. The host operating systems supported are:
- Linux
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD
- Apple OS X
- Windows
- Solaris
The functionality on a POSIX operating such as Linux and FreeBSD is similar and most features on Windows are supported but you are best to ask on the Users Mailing List if you have a specific question.
We recommend you maintain your operating system by installing any updates.
4.2. POSIX Hosts¶
POSIX hosts are most Unix operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. RTEMS development works well on Unix and can scale from a single user and a desktop machine to a team with decentralised or centralised development infrastructure.
4.2.1. Root Access¶
You either have root
access to your host development machine or you do
not. Some users are given hardware that is centrally managed. If you do not
have root
access you can create your work environment in your home
directory. You could use a prefix of $HOME/development/rtems
or
$HOME/rtems
. Note, the $HOME
environment variable can be
substituted with ~
.
Chapter 5 Section 1 - Prefixes details using Prefixes to manage the installation.
RTEMS Tools and packages do not require root
access
to be built and we encourage you to not build the tools as root
. If you
need to control write access then it is best to manage this with groups
assigned to users.
If you have root
access you can decide to install the tools under any
suitable prefix. This may depend on the hardware in your host development
machine. If the machine is a centralised build server the prefix may be used to
separate production versions from the test versions and the prefix paths may
have restricted access rights to only those who manage and have configuration
control of the machine. We call this project sandboxing and
Chapter 5 Section 1.1 - Project Sandboxing explains this in more detail.
4.3. Apple OS X¶
Apple’s OS X is fully supported. You need to download and install a recent
version of the Apple developer application Xcode. Xocde is available in the App
Store. Make sure you install the Command Line Tools add on available for
download within Xcode and once installed open a Terminal shell and enter the
command cc
and accept the license agreement.
The normal prefix when working on OS X as a user is under your home directory.
Prefixes of $HOME/development/rtems
or $HOME/rtems
are
suitable.
Chapter 5 Section 1 - Prefixes details using Prefixes to manage the installation.
4.4. Microsoft Windows¶
RTEMS supports Windows as a development host and the tools for most architectures are available. The RTEMS Project relies on the GNU tools for compilers and debuggers and we use the simulators that come with GDB and QEMU. The Windows support for these tools varies and the RTEMS Project is committed to helping the open source community improve the Windows experience. If something is not working or supported please email the Users Mailing List.
The RTEMS Project’s Windows tools are native Windows executables giving the user the best possible experience on Windows. Native Windows programs use the standard Windows DLLs and paths. Integration with standard Windows integrated development tools such as editors is straight forward. POSIX emulation environments such as Cygwin and the MSYS2 shell have special executables that require a POSIX emulation DLL and these emulation DLLs add an extra layer of complexity as well as a performance over-head. The RTEMS Project uses these POSIX emulation shells to run configure scripts that come with various open source packages such as gcc so they form an important and valued part of the environment we describe here. The output of this procedure forms the tools you use during your application development and they do not depend on the emulation DLLs.
The performance of the compiler is as good as you can have on Windows and the performance compiling a single file will be similar to that on a host like Linux or FreeBSD given the same hardware. Building the tools from source is much slower on Windows because POSIX shells and related tools are used and the POSIX emulation overhead it much much slower than a native POSIX operating system like Linux and FreeBSD. This overhead is only during the building of the tools and the RTEMS kernel and if you use a suitable build system that is native to Windows your application development should be similar to other operating systems.
Building is known to work on Windows 7 64bit Professional and Windows 10.
4.4.1. Windows Path Length¶
Windows path length is limited and can cause problems when building the
tools. The standard Windows API has a MAX_PATH
length of 260
characters. This can effect some of the tools used by RTEMS. It is recommended
you keep the top level directories as short as possible when building the RTEMS
tools and you should also keep an eye on the path length when developing your
application. The RTEMS built tools can handle much longer path lengths however
some of the GNU tools such as those in the binutils
package cannot.
The release packages of the RSB when unpacked have top level file names that are too big to build RTEMS. You need to change or rename that path to something smaller to build. This is indicated in Chapter 5 Section 2 - Releases.
4.4.2. Parallel Builds with Make¶
The MSYS2 GNU make
has problems when using the jobs option. The RSB
defaults to automatically using as many cores as the host machine has. To get a
successful build on Windows it is recommended you add the --jobs=none
option to all RSB build set commands.
4.4.3. POSIX Support¶
Building the RTEMS compilers, debugger, the RTEMS kernel and a number of other
3rd party packages requires a POSIX environment. On Windows you can use Cygwin
or MSYS2. This document focuses on MSYS2. It is smaller than Cygwin and comes
with the Arch Linux package manager pacman
.
MSYS2 provides MinGW64 support as well as a POSIX shell called MSYS2. The
MinGW64 compiler and related tools produce 64bit native Windows
executables. The shell is a standard Bourne shell and the MSYS2 environment is
a stripped Cygwin shell with enough support to run the various configure
scripts needed to build the RTEMS tools and the RTEMS kernel.
MSYS2 is built around the pacman
packaging tool. This makes MSYS2 a
distribution and that is a welcome feature on Windows. You get a powerful tool
to manage your development environment on Windows.
4.4.4. Python¶
We need Python to build the tools as the RSB is written in Python and we need suitable Python libraries to link to GDB as RTEMS makes use of GDB’s Python support. This places specific demands on the Python we need installed and available and MSYS2 provides suitable Python versions we can use. You need to make sure you have the correct type and version of Python installed.
We cannot use the Python executables created by the Python project (python.org) as they are built by Microsoft’s C (MSC) compiler. Linking the MSC Python libraries with the MinGW64 executables is not easy and MSYS provides us with a simple solution so we do not support linking MSC libraries.
MSYS2 provides two types and two versions of Python executables, MinGW and MSYS and Python version 2 and 3. For Windows we need the MinGW executable so we have suitables libraries and we have to have Python version 2 because on Windows GDB only builds with Python2.
You also need to install the MSYS version of Python along with the MinGW64 Python2 package. The MSYS Python is version 3 and the RSB can support version 2 and 3 of Python and it helps handle some of the long paths building GCC can generate.
4.4.5. Installing MSYS2¶
MSYS2 is installed on a new machine using the MSYS2 installer found on
https://msys2.github.io/. Please select the x86_64
variant for 64bit
support. Run the installer following the 7 steps listed on the page.
MSYS2 uses the pacman
package manager. The Arch Linux project has detailed
documentation on how to use pacman
. What is shown here is a just few
examples of what you can do.
Open a 64bit MSYS shell from the Start Menu:
The packages we require are:
- python
- mingw-w64-x86_64-python2
- mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc
- git
- bison
- cvs
- diffutils
- make
- patch
- tar
- texinfo
- unzip
Note
The actual output provided may vary due to changes in the dependent packages or newer package versions.
Install the packages using pacman
:
~
$ pacman -S python mingw-w64-x86_64-python2 mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc \
bison cvs diffutils git make patch tar texinfo unzip
resolving dependencies...
looking for conflicting packages...
Packages (74) db-5.3.28-2 expat-2.1.0-2 gdbm-1.11-3 heimdal-1.5.3-8
libgdbm-1.11-3 mingw-w64-x86_64-binutils-2.26-21
mingw-w64-x86_64-bzip2-1.0.6-5
mingw-w64-x86_64-ca-certificates-20150426-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-crt-git-5.0.0.4627.03684c4-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-expat-2.1.0-6 mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-libs-5.3.0-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-gdbm-1.11-3 mingw-w64-x86_64-gettext-0.19.6-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-gmp-6.1.0-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git-5.0.0.4627.53be55d-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-isl-0.15-1 mingw-w64-x86_64-libffi-3.2.1-3
mingw-w64-x86_64-libiconv-1.14-5
mingw-w64-x86_64-libsystre-1.0.1-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-libtasn1-4.7-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-libtre-git-r122.c2f5d13-4
mingw-w64-x86_64-libwinpthread-git-5.0.0.4573.628fdbf-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-mpc-1.0.3-2 mingw-w64-x86_64-mpfr-3.1.3.p0-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-ncurses-6.0.20160220-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-openssl-1.0.2.g-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-p11-kit-0.23.1-3
mingw-w64-x86_64-readline-6.3.008-1 mingw-w64-x86_64-tcl-8.6.5-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-termcap-1.3.1-2 mingw-w64-x86_64-tk-8.6.5-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-windows-default-manifest-6.4-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-winpthreads-git-5.0.0.4573.628fdbf-1
mingw-w64-x86_64-zlib-1.2.8-9 openssh-7.1p2-1 perl-5.22.0-2
perl-Authen-SASL-2.16-2 perl-Convert-BinHex-1.123-2
perl-Encode-Locale-1.04-1 perl-Error-0.17024-1
perl-File-Listing-6.04-2 perl-HTML-Parser-3.71-3
perl-HTML-Tagset-3.20-2 perl-HTTP-Cookies-6.01-2
perl-HTTP-Daemon-6.01-2 perl-HTTP-Date-6.02-2
perl-HTTP-Message-6.06-2 perl-HTTP-Negotiate-6.01-2
perl-IO-Socket-SSL-2.016-1 perl-IO-stringy-2.111-1
perl-LWP-MediaTypes-6.02-2 perl-MIME-tools-5.506-1
perl-MailTools-2.14-1 perl-Net-HTTP-6.09-1
perl-Net-SMTP-SSL-1.02-1 perl-Net-SSLeay-1.70-1
perl-TermReadKey-2.33-1 perl-TimeDate-2.30-2 perl-URI-1.68-1
perl-WWW-RobotRules-6.02-2 perl-libwww-6.13-1 vim-7.4.1468-1
bison-3.0.4-1 cvs-1.11.23-2 diffutils-3.3-3 git-2.7.2-1
make-4.1-4 mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc-5.3.0-2
mingw-w64-x86_64-python2-2.7.11-4 patch-2.7.5-1 python-3.4.3-3
tar-1.28-3 texinfo-6.0-1 unzip-6.0-2
Total Download Size: 114.10 MiB
Total Installed Size: 689.61 MiB
:: Proceed with installation? [Y/n] y
:: Retrieving packages...
mingw-w64-x86_64-gm... 477.1 KiB 681K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-li... 24.2 KiB 755K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-gc... 541.9 KiB 705K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-ex... 106.7 KiB 702K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-bz... 77.9 KiB 666K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-li... 600.2 KiB 703K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-ge... 3.0 MiB 700K/s 00:04 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-gd... 151.8 KiB 483K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-li... 34.5 KiB 705K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-li... 69.2 KiB 713K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-li... 9.3 KiB 778K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-nc... 1800.5 KiB 701K/s 00:03 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-li... 171.4 KiB 708K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-p1... 193.5 KiB 709K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-ca... 382.1 KiB 705K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-zl... 148.6 KiB 704K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-op... 3.3 MiB 624K/s 00:05 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-te... 12.6 KiB 76.7K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-re... 327.4 KiB 277K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-tc... 2.9 MiB 699K/s 00:04 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-tk... 1869.2 KiB 703K/s 00:03 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-py... 10.9 MiB 699K/s 00:16 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-bi... 12.7 MiB 688K/s 00:19 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-he... 5.0 MiB 645K/s 00:08 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-cr... 2.6 MiB 701K/s 00:04 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-is... 524.3 KiB 684K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-mp... 265.2 KiB 705K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-mp... 62.3 KiB 82.9K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-wi... 1484.0 B 0.00B/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-wi... 33.2 KiB 346K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
mingw-w64-x86_64-gc... 25.1 MiB 701K/s 00:37 [#####################] 100%
python-3.4.3-3-x86_64 12.1 MiB 700K/s 00:18 [#####################] 100%
bison-3.0.4-1-x86_64 1045.1 KiB 703K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
heimdal-1.5.3-8-x86_64 543.7 KiB 703K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
cvs-1.11.23-2-x86_64 508.2 KiB 388K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
diffutils-3.3-3-x86_64 265.7 KiB 478K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
expat-2.1.0-2-x86_64 13.1 KiB 817K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
vim-7.4.1468-1-x86_64 6.1 MiB 700K/s 00:09 [#####################] 100%
openssh-7.1p2-1-x86_64 653.4 KiB 703K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
db-5.3.28-2-x86_64 41.7 KiB 719K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
libgdbm-1.11-3-x86_64 20.4 KiB 754K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
gdbm-1.11-3-x86_64 108.5 KiB 704K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-5.22.0-2-x86_64 12.4 MiB 702K/s 00:18 [#####################] 100%
perl-Error-0.17024-... 17.1 KiB 742K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-Authen-SASL-2.... 42.4 KiB 731K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-Encode-Locale-... 9.7 KiB 745K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTTP-Date-6.02... 8.6 KiB 784K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-File-Listing-6... 7.7 KiB 769K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTML-Tagset-3.... 10.3 KiB 732K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTML-Parser-3.... 76.9 KiB 516K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-LWP-MediaTypes... 18.0 KiB 752K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-URI-1.68-1-any 75.6 KiB 609K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTTP-Message-6... 71.3 KiB 625K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTTP-Cookies-6... 20.4 KiB 499K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTTP-Daemon-6.... 14.2 KiB 749K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-HTTP-Negotiate... 11.4 KiB 817K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-Net-HTTP-6.09-... 19.8 KiB 732K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-WWW-RobotRules... 12.2 KiB 766K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-libwww-6.13-1-any 122.2 KiB 661K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-TimeDate-2.30-... 35.9 KiB 718K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-MailTools-2.14... 58.4 KiB 712K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-IO-stringy-2.1... 52.6 KiB 721K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-Convert-BinHex... 30.1 KiB 733K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-MIME-tools-5.5... 180.4 KiB 705K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-Net-SSLeay-1.7... 191.2 KiB 708K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-IO-Socket-SSL-... 112.5 KiB 703K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-Net-SMTP-SSL-1... 3.5 KiB 881K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
perl-TermReadKey-2.... 20.9 KiB 745K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
git-2.7.2-1-x86_64 3.6 MiB 702K/s 00:05 [#####################] 100%
make-4.1-4-x86_64 387.0 KiB 671K/s 00:01 [#####################] 100%
patch-2.7.5-1-x86_64 75.9 KiB 684K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
tar-1.28-3-x86_64 671.9 KiB 379K/s 00:02 [#####################] 100%
texinfo-6.0-1-x86_64 992.7 KiB 625K/s 00:02 [#####################] 100%
unzip-6.0-2-x86_64 93.1 KiB 705K/s 00:00 [#####################] 100%
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(74/74) loading package files [#####################] 100%
(74/74) checking for file conflicts [#####################] 100%
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:: Processing package changes...
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( 2/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gmp [#####################] 100%
( 3/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-libwinpthr... [#####################] 100%
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( 7/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-libiconv [#####################] 100%
( 8/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gettext [#####################] 100%
( 9/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-gdbm [#####################] 100%
(10/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-libffi [#####################] 100%
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(20/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-readline [#####################] 100%
(21/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-tcl [#####################] 100%
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(25/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-headers-git [#####################] 100%
(26/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-crt-git [#####################] 100%
(27/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-isl [#####################] 100%
(28/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-mpfr [#####################] 100%
(29/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-mpc [#####################] 100%
(30/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-windows-de... [#####################] 100%
(31/74) installing mingw-w64-x86_64-winpthread... [#####################] 100%
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(36/74) installing diffutils [#####################] 100%
(37/74) installing expat [#####################] 100%
(38/74) installing vim [#####################] 100%
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(51/74) installing perl-LWP-MediaTypes [#####################] 100%
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(57/74) installing perl-Net-HTTP [#####################] 100%
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(59/74) installing perl-libwww [#####################] 100%
Optional dependencies for perl-libwww
perl-LWP-Protocol-HTTPS: for https:// url schemes
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module test... pass.
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Optional dependencies for git
python2: various helper scripts
subversion: git svn
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Optional dependencies for patch
ed: for patch -e functionality
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