Re: [ts-7000] TS Virtual Machine Development Environment -- Any Interest?

[Andrew Gaylard <>]

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Derek <> wrote:

Just wondering if there would be any interest in a TS virtual machine development environment. I have taken my personal time at home to work on a VirtualBox image that features some common commands, examples, and development packages for a free and easy, quick-start development solution. I believe it would be a valuable resource to those without a development Linux box or to those who would simply rather work from a virtual machine. The idea of putting together a VirtualBox image came from many tech support calls and emails I took the common ideas/questions the customers had and put them together in this virtual machine. Ideas/questions such as:
"How do I image the SD card from Windows if Windows doesn't have the 'dd' command?"
"How can I cross-compile a c program?"
"How can I cross-compile a kernel?"
"How can I develop a GTK+ GUI application?"
"What about a generic Linux command cheat sheet?"
[snip]
What do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? Weaknesses? Strengths?

Yeah, this is a pretty good idea.  I won't be using it, however, since I've now
rolled my own environment, with scripts to build the cross-compiler et al.
But if it'd been available at the start, it'd have made my life quite a bit easier.

Actually, now that I think about it...  what  I'd *really* like is:

an officially-supported script, that:
(a) downloads the toolchain, kernel, and userland sources from their official
    upstream sites;
(b) downloads the necessary patches for EP93xx/TS7xxx: kernel, GCC, binutils, glibc;
(c) builds the toolchain;
(d) builds the kernel and a (minimal) userland with the newly-built toolchain;
(e) builds a file-tree with this userland, sized for the board's flash;
(f) makes the file-tree a JFFS2 (or similar) image, ready for flashing.
(g) (For extra points!) downloads and builds RedBoot for the board specified.

I know this is asking a lot, but I've had to do this myself anyway. (OK, I gave up
with getting "g" done, though). I strongly suspect that other serious embedded
developers also follow a process like this.

The problem is not "I need to download a good development environment
runtime (or kernel, or recent busybox, etc)", as some on this list have recently
requested.  The real problem is: once you have it, how did it get here?  What
sources were used?  What patches were applied, and from where?  What
build- flags were applied?  And so on, and so on.

Suppose TS makes available a new cross-GCC as binaries.  Then next week,
Martin Guy figures out the solution to another Maverick bug, and releases
a patch.  How do I upgrade the TS GCC now?  And I still have to rebuild
everything with it, too.  So the developers get frustrated, knowing that
they're behind the curve, and TS gets frustrated because they can't support
a moving target.

Building from source provides flexibility now (building on non-x86 hosts;
building under Cygwin, etc.)  And it provides great future-proofing 
(how do we build in N years' time when nobody has VirtualBox any more?).
It also encourages the input from the developer-base, so TS isn't alone
in keeping everything together.

What do you think?
Andrew.

__._,_.___

Your email settings: Individual Email|Traditional
Change settings via the Web (Yahoo! ID required)
Change settings via email: =Email Delivery: Digest | m("yahoogroups.com?subject","ts-7000-fullfeatured");=Change Delivery Format: Fully Featured">Switch to Fully Featured
Visit Your Group | Yahoo! Groups Terms of Use | =Unsubscribe

__,_._,___