On Thursday 4. February 2010 08.35.32 Andrew Gaylard wrote:
> 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:
What about buildroot, http://buildroot.uclibc.org/
Fullfills a-f and possibly g
>
> 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.
>
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