Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-12-29 | 
Be the First to Comment
Ever since I have been sending out weekly change logs, I have been impressed by the consistent amount of development activity in the OpenEmbedded project. Every week there are consistently over a dozen developers making changes. Developers come and go, but the contribution level always seems healthy. While this amount of development leads to some [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-11-05 | 2 Comments to Read
I do quite a few OpenEmbedded project builds during the course of a week. This process usually takes 3-5 minutes. That is just enough time to get distracted doing something else and forget about the build until an hour later when you realize — oops, I was supposed to send out a release email once [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-10-13 | Be the First to Comment
A common question is how do you do kernel development with OpenEmbedded? Typically, OpenEmbedded builds a kernel by checking the source out of a git repository, or by applying patch files to a released version of the kernel. See the many recipes for examples. This works very well for a Linux distribution build system, but [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-09-08 | 6 Comments to Read
I recently wrote an article about best practices building Qt applications with OpenEmbedded, and it occured to me that I should write an equivalent article for Gtk+ applications. The same points apply — put your application source in a SCM system, and put the install logic in the application source (read the above article). The [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-08-06 | 10 Comments to Read
This article describes how to cross compile a Qt application (named qt_tutorial) with OpenEmbedded, and several best practices you should consider. OpenEmbedded currently includes fairly good support for building Qt — both Qt Embedded and Qt X11. OE also includes a number of qt classes that make building Qt applications easy. One of the main [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-07-14 | 3 Comments to Read
One task that is a often confusing to new OpenEmbedded users is how to capture changes to the source code for a package/recipe. First, lets review the progression in tools use to capture source code changes.
In days of yore, developers often used gnu diff to capture modifications to a source tree. The typical practice was [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-06-20 | Read the First Comment
Occasionally I am asked how Embedded Linux compares with Windows CE. I have spent the past 5 years doing mostly embedded Linux development, and the previous 5 years doing mostly WinCE development with a few exceptions, so my thoughts are no doubt a little biased toward what I understand best. So take this with a [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-05-13 | 2 Comments to Read
Very interesting news from MontaVista yesterday as they announced MontaVista Linux 6. It turns out they are using bitbake, which is the core of the OpenEmbedded build system. Along with the adoption of OpenEmbedded in many leading Embedded Linux efforts (Beagleboard, Gumstix, Bug Labs, etc), this is a resounding affirmation that the OpenEmbedded way of [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-05-11 | Be the First to Comment
Although ssh and friends work really well for embedded systems, occasionally you want to set up a NFS root for development. One of the scenarios where nfsroot is useful is if you are making a lot of rootfs changes, and you don’t want to spend the time to reprogram the flash on the target system. [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-04-24 | Be the First to Comment
The cm-x270 kernel support in OpenEmbedded has just been updated to version 2.6.29.
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-02-20 | 2 Comments to Read
Having used OpenEmbedded for a number of Embedded Linux projects over the past 5 years, it is interesting watching new users come on board. The most recent announcement came from Koan that the KaeilOS distribution will be joining the OpenEmbedded project. In the announcement, they summed up my thoughts well:
We at KOAN wanted to avoid [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-28 | 3 Comments to Read
The Socketcan test applications and utilities are now available in OpenEmbedded. The socketcan kernel modules already exist in OE. To build and deploy:
get the latest version of OE metadata
bitbake socketcan-utils-test
scp <oedir>/build/angstrom-2008.1/tmp/deploy/glibc/ipk/<machine>/socketcan-utils-test_0.0+svnr917-r0_armv5te.ipk root@<target IP address>:
And then on the target system:
opkg install socketcan-utils-test_0.0+svnr917-r0_armv5te.ipk
opkg files socketcan-utils-test
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_rx_sendto
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_tx_sendto
/usr/bin/canlogserver
/usr/bin/tst_raw_filter
/usr/bin/tst_raw
/usr/bin/isotpsniffer
/usr/bin/isotpsend
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_throttle
/usr/bin/tst_packet
/usr/bin/vcan
/usr/bin/isotprecv
/usr/bin/cansniffer
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_tx_read
/usr/bin/tst_err
/usr/bin/log2asc
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_single
/usr/bin/tst_filter_master
/usr/bin/canplayer
/usr/bin/cangen
/usr/bin/slcanpty
/usr/bin/log2long
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_rtr
/usr/bin/asc2log
/usr/bin/slcan_attach
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_filter
/usr/bin/cansend
/usr/bin/canecho
/usr/bin/tst_filter_server
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_cycle
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_dump
/usr/bin/isotpdump
/usr/bin/candump
/usr/bin/tst_raw_sendto
/usr/bin/isotptun
/usr/bin/tst_bcm_server
/usr/bin/tst_proc
/usr/bin/canbusload
An impressive array of utilities!
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-26 | 10 Comments to Read
I just added a recipe to OpenEmbedded to build the Socketcan kernel modules from the socketcan SVN. So if you are using the latest OpenEmbedded metadata, you can:
bitbake socketcan-modules
scp <oedir>/build/angstrom-2008.1/tmp/deploy/glibc/ipk/<machine>/socketcan-modules_0.0+svnr917-r0_cm-x270.ipk root@<target IP address>:
and then on the target system:
opkg install socketcan-modules_0.0+svnr917-r0_cm-x270.ipk
opkg files socketcan-modules
Package socketcan-modules (0.0+svnr917-r0) is installed on root and has the following files:
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/net/can/can-bcm.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/sja1000/ems_pci.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/net/can/can-raw.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/sja1000/sja1000.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/softing/softing.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/sja1000/ems_pcmcia.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/sja1000/sja1000_platform.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/can-dev.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/softing/softing_cs.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/sja1000/pipcan.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/mcp251x.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/net/can/can.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/net/can/can-isotp.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.27/extra/drivers/net/can/vcan.ko
Then to use [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-10 | Be the First to Comment
I recently added Mono 2.2 RC1 to OpenEmbedded. The last usable version of Mono in Openembedded was 1.2.6, so this is a big step up. Lots of interesting things have been happening since then (like Full Static Compilation) that continue to make Mono interesting for embedded. There is still plenty to do yet such as [...]
Posted by Cliff Brake on 2009-01-09 | Be the First to Comment
Recently the OpenEmbedded project has switched to the Git version control system. This is good news for many reasons. The obvious reasons are Git is faster than Monotone, handles branching better, has lots of nice features, larger user base, etc. Monotone has served us well, but as new tools become available, it is time to [...]