Installing and Activating Cross Development Environment Print

 

Installation and activation of the Emcraft Vybrid cross development environment is described in Chapter 7 of the Vybrid VF6 SOM Starter Kit Guide. The distribution provides a Linux-hosted cross development environment that targets Linux on the Cortex-A5 core and MQX RTOS on the Cortex-M4 core. The Multi-Core Communication libraries are available to allow communications and interactions between Linux on the Cortex-A5 and MQX on the Cortex-M4.

The Emcraft Linux Vybrid software development environment makes use of a Yocto-based software distribution and development environment that includes the GNU cross development tools as well as a large number of pre-built and packaged Linux tools and libraries ready for immediate use on Cortex-A5. In strict compliance with the GPL and related licenses, the Yocto distribution is provided by Emcraft with full source code, including all patches, extensions, programs and scripts used to build the distribution for Cortex-A5. Typically, our users just proceed to deploy the prebuilt Yocto packages on the target, however if you need to check the sources or rebuild some packages (or the entire thing), this possibility is available too.

In addition to the Yocto collection of packages, the Emcraft distribution includes a small number of software components that are not packaged within the Yocto framework and instead distributed as a simple compressed tarball. These components include U-Boot, Linux kernel, Cortex-M4 MQX Board Software Package (BSP) and some other Vybrid software components highly optimized for the Emcraft VF6 System-On-Module (SOM). These components are installed on the Linux cross development host along side the Yocto distribution. It is these components that you will be modifying, configuring and rebuilding for your specific application, primarily.

The installation procedure is simple. Just follow the instructions in the Starter Kit and you should be up and running quickly.

Generally speaking, our customers do not have many issues if any with installation and activation of the cross development environment. For some reason, the most frequently occurring error is that people forget to run the activation script. This obviously results in insufficient path settings and compilers failing to build sources for the Vybrid.

The activation script needs to be run any time you start a development session. The script resides at the top of the installation directory:

-bash-4.2$ cd linux-vf6-1.14.0/
-bash-4.2$ ls
ACTIVATE.sh linux _MANIFEST projects target u-boot
-bash-4.2$

Here is how the script is executed. Note that you must type . followed by a space before the name of the script:

-bash-4.2$ . ./ACTIVATE.sh

An alternative way to run the script is to perform the following command:

-bash-4.2$ source ACTIVATE.sh

Whichever way you run the script, it sets a number of environment variables that are required for the cross development environment to function correctly. One of those variables is called MCU>. The easy way to test if the cross development environment is active is to run the following command:

-bash-4.2$ echo $MCU
VF6
-bash-4.2$

If MCU is empty or set to something other than VF6, this means that you have forgotten to run the activation script or somehow run it incorrectly.

Some of our customers ask if the cross development environment can be run on a Windows host. We don't support Windows explicitly, however some of our customers have been successfully running the development environment on a virtual Linux machine under Windows.