Development Environment

Source Code, Compilers, and System Generator

Intall the Toolchain

SDVOS needs to be configured before compilation. This requires a system generator. To build the system generator from source, we need to install the compiler and other tools on the host operating system either through your distribution's package manager or by building the binaries from source. I developed SDVOS on Ubuntu Linux. Theoretically, any UNIX-like system should be able to serve as a development platform. I am also working on a Window setup possibly with Cygwin. You just need to make sure GCC, Flex, and Bison are all installed. The version of these tools should not matter, even though I used GCC 4.8.4, Flex 2.5.35, and Bison 3.0.2. On Ubuntu, you can install these packages by using the following command:

bash$ sudo apt-get install gcc flex bison

Additionally, the system generator requires autoconf to generate the makefile for compilation. You can install autoconf on Ubuntu with the following command:

bash$ sudo apt-get install autoconf

With the tools above installed, you are now ready to build the system generator. However, we are still missing the toolchain needed for kernel compilation. The GCC we just installed are native to your host machine. Unless you only want to try SDVOS in Linux environment, an architecture specific cross compiler is also needed to compile the kernel for a specific board. Currently, SDVOS requires GCC. Support of other compilers will be added in the future. A detailed description of how to prepare a toolchain for your target board can be found in the platform support tutorials.