view doc/Compiling @ 243:35474f3a1782

FCBM: beginning of display output
author Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
date Mon, 03 May 2021 04:43:06 +0000
parents a62e5bf88434
children
line wrap: on
line source

Preparing the development and build environment
===============================================

In order to compile our FreeCalypso Tourmaline firmware, you will need a
Unix/Linux system.  Even though we are using a compiler which we got in the
form of Windows .exe binaries and thus have to use Wine (see below), everything
that we have built on top of it is Unix-based.  The Mother currently uses
Slackware Linux release 14.2 (32-bit) and previously used Slackware 13.37,
also 32-bit.

You will need to install the following 3 pieces of software on whatever
machine you will use to run the FC Tourmaline build process:

1. Wine: self-explanatory.  The Mother uses the following Slackware package:

   https://www.freecalypso.org/members/falcon/slackware/wine-1.5.23-i486-1sg.txz

   I originally used it with Slackware 13.37 and I am still able to use it
   with 14.2 without any issues.

2. FreeCalypso Wine environment:

   ftp://ftp.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/TI_src/wine/installed-env.tar.xz

   Extract the content of the above tarball into your ~/.wine/drive_c
   directory - that's all there is to it!

3. nowhine wrapper around Wine:

   ftp://ftp.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/TI_src/wine/nowhine.c

   The purpose of this wrapper is to suppress the following obnoxious whine
   which wine emits on my system:

   preloader: Warning: failed to reserve range 00010000-00110000

   Wine will also emits a bunch of other whines if you have to run it
   in an environment without an X11 display (e.g., on a machine that you
   ssh into), and our nowhine wrapper suppresses those as well.

   If wine does not emit those preloader whines on your system and you
   never find yourself in a situation of having to run without an X11
   display and thus you find our nowhine wrapper to be unnecessary,
   you can skip the wrapper and create a nowhine symlink pointing directly
   to wine.

Compiling the local helper utilities
====================================

(cd helpers; make)

Do the above.  Most of the build helper scripts used in the FC Tourmaline build
system are written in Bourne shell, but a few were easier to implement in C.
You need to compile these C helper utilities before you can run an actual FC
Tourmaline firmware build, but these utilities are totally ad hoc and specific
to the needs of our fw build system, hence they are not meant to be installed
globally on your system - instead they stay within the fc-tourmaline tree.  You
just need to run make in the helpers directory once before any actual firmware
builds.

Actually building the firmware
==============================

In order to build our FreeCalypso Tourmaline firmware for a particular target
in a particular configuration, run a command like this from the top level of
the fc-tourmaline tree:

./configure.sh luna2 bigcolor-gprs

The first required argument to the configure.sh script selects the hardware
target, the second required argument selects the functional configuration, and
any further arguments beyond these two (optional) allow changing various
configurable settings that go beyond basic functional selection and aren't
strictly fixed by the hardware target.

As of this writing, the following hardware targets are supported:

c11x		Motorola C11x/12x
c139		Motorola C139/140
c155		Motorola C155/156
fcdev3b		FreeCalypso FCDEV3B
gtamodem	The Calypso GSM/GPRS modem in Openmoko GTA01/02 smartphones
gtm900mgc	Huawei GTM900, hardware variant MGC1GSMT or MGC2GSMT
j100		Sony Ericsson J100
luna1		FreeCalypso Luna, based on iWOW DSK v4.0 or v5.0 motherboard
luna2		FreeCalypso Luna, based on FC Caramel2 motherboard
pirelli		Pirelli DP-L10
tangomdm	FreeCalypso Tango standard modem config

The second required argument selects the basic functional configuration; these
functional config stanzas appear in the configs directory.  The following
functional configurations are currently available:

bigcolor-gprs & bigcolor-vo

	These are UI-enabled configurations with the big (176x220 pixel) color
	version of the UI.  These functional configs can be built only for
	luna1 and luna2 targets.

smallbw

	Small B&W UI configuration - 96x64 pixel black&white UI version.  This
	functional config can be built for c139, luna1 and luna2 targets.  When
	running on Luna, the logical 96x64 pixel B&W LCD is centered in the
	middle of the 176x220 pixel physical LCD, surrounded by a pale magenta
	border.

bwtest

	This one is a special intermediate configuration is that the UI layers
	are built in the smallbw config, but the underlying R2D framebuffer
	driver is 176x220 pixel B&W, rather than 96x64 pixel B&W.  This config
	can only be built for Luna targets; it originates from TI's own
	configuration of running their !LSCREEN (smallbw) UI on D-Sample boards
	with R2D driver in the BW_D_Sample config.

stdmodem

	Standard modem config, all data services enabled, no UI functionality
	included.  Supported targets are fcdev3b, gtamodem, gtm900mgc and
	tangomdm.

vpm

	See the Voice-pseudo-modem article.  This functional config is
	applicable to c11x, c139, c155, j100 and pirelli targets.

Each configuration is built in its own directory; the name of this build
directory takes the form of build-$TARGET-$CONFIG$SUFFIX, i.e., for the example
configure.sh line above, the resulting build directory will be named
build-luna2-bigcolor-gprs.  The $SUFFIX part is empty by default, but can be set
on the command line in order to distinguish non-standard builds that had some
tunable settings changed to values other than the default.  For example, if you
are building modem firmware for an FCDEV3B V1 board where you need to disable
sleep, you should run the configure script as follows:

./configure.sh fcdev3b stdmodem DISABLE_SLEEP=1 SUFFIX=-nosleep

The build directory would then become build-fcdev3b-stdmodem-nosleep, and the
specified suffix will also be included in the firmware version ID string that
gets compiled into the image.

To actually compile the firmware, cd into the created build directory and run
make there.  Unfortunately the use of TI's proprietary compiler via Wine makes
the build quite slow, but there is a trick to speed it up: if you run some
other Wine program that stays open and does not exit on its own (e.g., wine cmd)
in another window and leave it open while you run your FC Tourmaline fw build,
the build will proceed much faster - the presence of another Wine process using
the wineserver environment will keep Wine from shutting this environment down
and restarting it for every individual cl470 run, i.e., for each individual C
source file.

When the build is done, the flashable firmware image will be in fwimage.bin.
This image is to be flashed with fc-loadtool at a target-dependent base address.
The build system also produces a short text file named flash-script which is a
flashing command script for fc-loadtool that erases the correct range of flash
sectors and then programs fwimage.bin at the right address.

When building firmware for the FCDEV3B or for the Pirelli, one can build either
a flashable image or a RAM-loadable one - or both.  Because this part of the
build system is common with other targets for which only flash images can be
produced, the Makefile always builds the flashable image by default -
fwimage.bin is always meant for flash and never for RAM.  To build a RAM-
loadable image when the target allows it, run 'make ram' - the image will be in
ramimage.srec, which you can then load and run on the target with FreeCalypso
host tool fc-xram.

Cached libraries
================

In the build architecture of all TCS211-based firmwares including Tourmaline,
each fw component is first compiled into a linkable library (*.lib file with
TI's TMS470 toolchain), and then these libraries are linked together into the
final code image.  Early in FreeCalypso project history many of these component
libraries were blobs, meaning that we had to use prebuilt libraries for which
we had no corresponding source.  Our fw has now been almost fully deblobbed,
meaning that we have transitioned from blobs to recompilation from source for
almost all of our fw components.  But this deblobbing has had an unfortunate
downside: because our Wine-based compiler is very slow, every time we deblobbed
a component library, build times would get longer and longer.

FC Tourmaline introduces a partial solution to this problem in the form of
cached libs.  Some component libraries are completely independent of
configuration particulars, i.e., they remain exactly the same no matter which
Calypso target you are building firmware for, and are likewise unaffected by
our various supported functional configs.  Prebuilt versions of these config-
independent libs have been checked into the cache directory of our source tree,
and Tourmaline fw builds use these cached libs by default.  These cached libs
are NOT blobs in that we do have the corresponding source for them, and the
versions that are checked in have been built by us, not by any evil source-
withholding third parties.  You can disable the use of cached libs and force
full recompilation from source by adding a USE_CACHE=0 argument to your
configure.sh line.

Running on the hardware
=======================

In order to run the firmware you have built on your Calypso phone or modem
(flash or run in RAM as appropriate), you will need to use FreeCalypso host
tools.  The current version at any given moment can be found at this URL:

ftp://ftp.freecalypso.org/pub/GSM/FreeCalypso/fc-host-tools-latest.tar.bz2

Please see target-specific notes for more details.