Development
for Blackfin devices running Linux is done with a cross compiler and
associated toolchain, on Linux (or if you know what you're doing maybe
some other Unix variant). To someone with only moderate Linux
experience, setting this up can be daunting. For someone whose employer
requires that they run Windows, nearly impossible. There are two
pre-existing solutions to this problem:
The first option is to use CoLinux
on Windows with customized, Blackfin development specific images.
CoLinux works reasonably well, but you still have to install the
toolchain and depending on your environment, networking can be
miserable to configure. I have used CoLinux, but found it to be
occasionally unstable (the latest version is much better however) and
difficult to configure.
The second option for the Windows user is to use a native Windows toolchain.
This works fine for doing simple application development, but because
of the non-case sensitive nature of Windows filesystems you can't do
kernel development this way.
An alternative is to use some sort of computer emulator such as VMware
or VirtualBox. Since VMware is probably the more mature of the two, I
decided to go with it. Since my development environment is made up of
freely available software, I have decided to release my VMware images
to save you the effort of configuring your own environment.
My environment consists of a normal Ubuntu
install with all the libraries and tools needed to compile the u-boot
bootloader and the uClinux distribution for the Blackfin architecture.
The current version includes:
- The latest Blackfin Toolchain release from http://blackfin.uclinux.org with several compiler versions to choose from.
- A preconfigured TFTP server for loading binaries (just place files in /tftpboot)
- An FTP server for getting files to/from the Blackfin (or any other computer)
- Current
Git Snapshots of u-boot and uclinux-dist preconfigured/compiled for the
BlackStamp (you can easily recompile them for any Blackfin target)
Grab a copy here and then move on to the Install/Use HOWTO.