IMote2 Compiler

This article assumes that you already have tinyos-2.x installed on your system. Go to http://www.tinyos.net/tinyos-2.x/doc/html/install-tinyos.html for install instructions. Do not install the xscale tools from that page (step 3 can be skipped).

Installing xscale-elf toolchain with Debian packages

Download packages

Download the following package files:

xscale-elf-binutils-2.15-2.i386.deb

xscale-elf-gcc-3.4.3-2.i386.deb

xscale-elf-newlib-1.13.0-1.i386.deb

Install the packages

$ dpkg --install xscale-elf-binutils-2.15-2.i386.deb
$ dpkg --install xscale-elf-gcc-3.4.3-2.i386.deb
$ dpkg --install xscale-elf-newlib-1.13.0-1.i386.deb

That's it. Run make on Blink (or other code) to see if it works:

$ cd $TOSROOT/apps/Blink
$ make intelmote2

You should see an executable output.

Installing xscale-elf toolchain from source

If you can install debian packages and do no need the source, this section is not for you. Scroll up and install the packages.

The xscale-elf rpms on the Tinyos-2.x install page contain a version of newlib that does not work on debian linux. Instead, we opted for a newer version of newlib (1.13). In this section, we mostly followed the instructions from the Harvard imote2 install page for compiling from source: [1]

Download source

To compile a working xscale-elf toolchain on debian from source, you will need to download the following source distributions:

xscale-elf-binutils 2.15

xscale-elf-gcc 3.4.3

newlib 1.13

Note: The links to the source files are different from the ones on the Harvard imote2 install page.

Define environment variables

These can be removed after the installation.

$ export TARGET=xscale-elf
$ export PREFIX=/usr

If you don't already have the bin subdir of the directory specified by PREFIX added to your PATH, add it now:

$ export PATH=${PREFIX}/bin:${PATH}

Build binutils

$ tar xzf xscale-elf-binutils-2.15.tgz
$ cd xscale-elf-binutils-2.15
$ mkdir build; cd build
$ ../configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX
$ make all install

Build bootstrap compiler

$ tar xzf xscale-elf-gcc-3.4.3.tgz
$ cd xscale-elf-gcc-3.4.3
$ mkdir build; cd build
$ ../configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX \
   --with-newlib --without-headers --with-gnu-as \
   --with-gnu-ld --disable-shared --enable-languages=c
$ make all-gcc install-gcc

Build newlib

$ tar xzf newlib-1.13.0.tar.gz
$ cd newlib-1.13.0
$ mkdir build; cd build
$ ../configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX
$ make all install

Rebuild gcc

$ cd xscale-elf-gcc-3.4.3
$ cd build
$ rm -rf *
$ ../configure --target=$TARGET --prefix=$PREFIX \
   --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld --enable-languages=c
$ make all install

Verification

You should now be able to compile Blink:

$ cd $TOSROOT/apps/Blink
$ make intelmote2

You should see an executable output.

--Ian Freeman

Note: These instructions were tested and found to be working on Ubuntu 8.04 and XubunTOS-2.0 (Ubuntu 7.04). Some times during the testing, instead of the

/usr

, we tried with

/opt

directory and it still works.

Using Newer Toolchain

Given that several members of our group had had difficulty compiling certain applications using the GNU toolchain described above, I have tested these instructions using GCC 4.2.4 and Binutils 2.17 (later versions of Binutils (2.18) may work; I did test with GCC 4.3.1 and was unable to compile for the "arm-eabi" target.) A few small diffs are needed against the generally excellent instructions above, including:

• Apparently xscale-elf support is being phased out, so you need to export TARGET=arm-eabi.
• Once you have compiled and installed the toolchain, you need to fix a few things in various places in the T2 tree to get the compilation process to work correctly. In our T2 tree I've created a new compilation target called intelmote2-gcc42, which should be apparently how to do from the diffs below, but in general you need to make the following changes in the following places:
  • support/make/pxa27x/pxa27x.rules, to fix various pieces of the toolchain:
    • s/xscale-elf-as/arm-eabi-as/, s/xscale-elf-objdump/arm-eabi-objdump/, s/xscale-elf-objcopy/arm-eabi-objcopy/. You can probably do a global search and replace changing "xscale-elf" to "arm-eabi".
    • Add "PFLAGS += -mcpu=xscale". If you do not set this correctly the compiler will emit incorrect instructions causing some things to work and others to fail miserably.
  • tos/platforms/intelmote2/.platform, to fix the compiler target: (not sure why this is hidden here)
    • s/xscale-elf-gcc/arm-eabi-gcc/.

Testing Newer Toolchain

So far the following things seem to work:

• apps/Blink
• apps/RadioCountToLeds
• Our volcano application, which is quite complex and exercises the radio and Flash as well as a number of other things.

I've run a few of the things in the test directory for fun:

• apps/tests/LplBroadcastCountToLeds (needs to add TARGET_INTELMOTE2 to the list of supported targets to compile)
• apps/tests/LplBroadcastPeriodicDelivery (needs to add TARGET_INTELMOTE2 to the list of supported targets to compile)

Feel free to add to either of these lists if you successfully use the GCC 4.2.4 tools.

--Gwa 14:07, 11 July 2008 (EDT)