view www/FAQ.html @ 1012:4d59b8946220

Bugfix by David Seikel: don't append .tar.bz2 twice to BINARY_PACKAGE_TARBALLS.
author Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>
date Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:02:14 -0500
parents 777af6561b2c
children 81003c9f31cb
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<title>Frequently Asked Questions</title>

<ul>
<li><p><a href=#where_start>Q: Where do I start?</a></p></li>

<li><p><a href=#ubuntu_mispackaged_qemu>Q: ./run-emulator.sh says qemu-system-mips isn't found, but I installed qemu.  Why isn't this working?</a></p></li>

<li><p><a href=#case_sensitive_patch>Q: I added my uClibc patch to sources/patches but it didn't do anything, what's wrong?</a></p></li>

<li><p><a href=#package_breaks>Q: Why did packate build $NAME die because it couldn't find $PREREQUISITE, even though it's installed?</a></p></li>
</ul>

<a name=where_start /><h2>Q: Where do I start?</h2>

<p>The project provides development and test environments for lots of different
hardware platforms, based on busybox and uClibc and configured to run under
QEMU.</p>

<p>Most people want to do one of three things:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Download a prebuilt cross compiler and cross-compile stuff with it.</p>

<p>Go <a href=screenshots>here</a> and download the appropriate
cross-compiler-<b>$TARGET</b>.tar.bz2 for your $TARGET, extract it, add its
"bin" directory to your $PATH, and use the appropriate $TARGET-cc and
$TARGET-ld and so on to compile your program.  (The tool names have prefixes
so they can be in the same $PATH as your host's existing compiler.)</p>
</li>

<li><p>Download a prebuilt system image, boot it up under the emulator, and
compile stuff natively for a target.</p>

<p>Go <a href=screenshots>here</a> and download the appropriate
system-image-<b>$ARCH</b>.tar.bz2 for your $TARGET, extract it, cd into it,
and <b>./run-emulator.sh</b> to boot it under qemu.</p>

<p>Alternately, you can run the script <b>./development-environment.sh</b>,
which is a wrapper around run-emulator.sh that feeds QEMU extra options to add
memory (256 megs) and writeable disk space (a blank 2 gigabyte disk image
mounted on /home) to provide a more capable development environment.</p>

<p>The system images contain native compiler toolchains, but if you install
distccd on the host and add the appropriate cross compiler to your host's
$PATH, the ./run-emulator.sh script will detect this and set up the system
image to automatically use distcc to call out to the cross compiler through
the virtual network, speeding up native builds significantly.<p>
</li>

<li><p>Build their own cross compilers and system images from source, using
the build scripts.</p>

<p>Go to the <a href=downloads>downloads directory</a> and grab the highest
numbered release tarball, extract it, and run <b>./build.sh</b> to list
the available targets.  The run <b>./build.sh $TARGET</b> to compile
the one you like.  The results are in the "build> directory.</p>

<p>The build scripts are written in bash, and fairly extensively commented.
All the scripts at the top level are designed to be run directly, and
build.sh is just a wrapper script that calls them in order.  The less commonly
used scripts in <b>sources/more</b> are also designed to be run directly.</p>

<p>Go to the <a href=/ht/firmware>mercurial archive</a> to grab the latest
development version out of source control.  If you don't want to use mercurial,
you can grab a <a href=/hg/firmware/archive/tip.tar.bz2>tarball</a> of the
current code at any time.</p>
</li>


</ul>

<p>For the first two, the <a href=downloads/binaries>downloads/binaries
directory</a> has all the prebuilt binaries for the current release.</p>

<p>For the third, go to the <a href=downloads>downloads directory and grab
a release tarball</a>, or else look at the <a href=/ht/firmware>mercurial
archive</a> to grab the latest development version out of source control.
(If you don't want to mess with mercurial, you can grab a
<a href=/hg/firmware/archive/tip.tar.bz2>tarball</a> of the current code
at any time.</p>

<p>If all else fails, look at the pretty
<a href=screenshots>screenshots</a>.</p>



<a name=ubuntu_mispackaged_qemu /><h2>Q: ./run-emulator.sh says qemu-system-$TARGET isn't found, but I installed the qemu package and the executable "qemu" is there.  Why isn't this working?</h2>

<p>A: You're using Ubuntu, aren't you?  You need to install
"qemu-kvm-extras" to get the non-x86 targets.</p>

<p>The Ubuntu developers have packaged qemu in an <strike>actively
misleading</strike> "interesting" way.  They've confused the emulator QEMU
with the virtualizer KVM.</p>

<p>QEMU is an emulator that supports multiple hardware
targets, translating the target code into host code a page at a time.  KVM
stands for Kernel Virtualization Module, a kernel module which allows newer x86
chips with support for the "VT" extension to run x86 code in a virtual
container.</p>

<p>The KVM project started life as a fork of QEMU (replacing QEMU's CPU
emulation with a kernel module providing VT virtualization support, but
using QEMU's device emulation for I/O), but KVM only ever offered a
small subset of the functionality of QEMU, and current versions of QEMU have
merged KVM support into the base package.  (QEMU 0.11.0 can automatically
detect and use the KVM module as an accelerator, where appropriate.)</p>

<p>It's a bit like the X11 project providing a "drm" module (for 3D acceleration
and such), which was integrated upstream into the Linux kernel.  The Linux
kernel was never part of the X11 project, and vice versa, and pretending the
two projects were the same thing would be wrong.</p>

<p>That said, on Ubuntu the "qemu" package is an alias for "qemu-kvm", a
package which only supports i386 and x86_64 (because that's all KVM supports
when running on an x86 PC).  In order to install the rest of qemu (support
for emulating arm, mips, powerpc, sh4, and so on), you need to install
the "qemu-kvm-extras" package (which despite the name has nothing whatsoever
to do with KVM).</p>

<p>Support for non-x86 targets is part of the base package when you build QEMU
from source.  If you ignore Ubuntu's packaging insanity and build QEMU
from source, you shouldn't have to worry about this strangely named
artificial split.</p>

<a name=case_sensitive_patch /><h2>Q: I added a uClibc patch to sources/patches but it didn't do anything, what's wrong?</h2>

<p>The Linux filesystem is case sensitive, so the patch has to start with
"uClibc-" with a capital C.</p>

<a name=package_breaks /><h2>Q: Why did the $NAME package build die
with a complaint that it couldn't find $PREREQUISITE, even though that's
installed on the host?  (For example, distcc and python.)</h2>

<p>Because you skipped the host-tools.sh step, and because installing a package
on the host isn't the same as installing it on the target.</p>

<p>Even though host-tools.sh is technically an optional step, your host has to
be carefully set up to work without it.</p>

<p>Not only does host-tools.sh add prerequisite packages your build requires,
it _removes_ everything else from the path that might change the behavior of
the build.  Without this, the ./configure stages of various packages will
detect that libtool exists, or that the host has Python or Perl installed,
and configure the packages to make use of things that the cross compiler's
headers and libraries don't have, and that the target root filesystem
may not have installed.</p>

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