Building RTEMS for a host?

[Chris Johns]

Thomas Doerfler wrote:
> 
> Stefan.Pusl at comneon.com schrieb:
>> This sounds quite good. Is there a way to run a program executable under windows
 >> (e.g. Windows 2000)? The reason is, that a simulator increases the 
complexity.
>> In order to have fast success, it is always better to keep it simple.
> 

I am developing RTEMS using the QEMU simulator for the i386 target and 
it is the simplest way to run RTEMS I have come across. I do not have 
networking running but everything else is working and I find it much 
simpler to use and develop with than real hardware. This is all in a 
laptop on Windows or a desktop Linux machine. I should point out the 
area I am currently working on, the capture engine, does not care about 
hardware or real-time so it is suitable for simulation.

I did build myself a grub image and I used Linux for this. My grub image 
reads the grub conf file from the root of the simulated hda (c:) disk. 
This means I can create different grub menus for each set up I am 
testing. The grub boot image is just a binary file and I am happy to 
share it to anyone who wants it.

A nice aspect is debugging with gdb. You start qemu with -s and it 
starts a gdb server. You can then connect gdb to the qemu session and 
have full debugging support. There is a small issue relating to stepping 
and interrupts but this can be worked around.

> In general, Win2000/XP as a host is supported through either the cygwin
> tools or the MinGW toolset, see:
> http://www.rtems.com/wiki/index.php/MinGW_Tools_for_Windows

Let me know if any thing is missing from this page. I did build the gdb 
for the i386 target by hand. I am yet to finish adding gdb support to 
the tools.

> 
> I have no experience, whether you can run a RTEMS executable under
> Windows/cygwin. Since the cygwin environment is not a perfect emulation
> of a posix environment, I would expect some problems there. Maybe some
> other guy has experience here?
> 

I would not use the host directly when good simulators exist.

Regards
Chris