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CHANGES: fc-host-tools-r21 about to be released
author Mychaela Falconia <falcon@freecalypso.org>
date Tue, 12 Dec 2023 07:45:56 +0000
parents f33d050eac6e
children
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Building and installing FreeCalypso host tools
==============================================

Our FreeCalypso host tools are designed to be installed in the /opt/freecalypso
directory hierarchy on your system.  The author of this software is very
old-fashioned and refuses to use autotools (sorry, we aren't GNU), hence
various hard-coded paths under /opt/freecalypso are sprinkled in bazillion
places - thus changing this fixed install location is deemed to be impractical.
See PACKAGING and doc/opt-freecalypso-tree for more notes on this subject.

In order to compile and install our host tools, follow these steps:

1: Run 'make' as a regular user (not root) to compile the software.

2: Decide if you prefer to have the /opt/freecalypso directory and everything
   under it to be owned by root or by your non-root uid.

If you prefer /opt/freecalypso to be root-owned:

   3A: Run 'make install' as root; the install rule in the
       Makefile will do mkdir -p /opt/freecalypso as its first step.

   4A: You are done!

If you prefer /opt/freecalypso to be owned by your "regular" non-root uid:

   3B: Become root just to create the /opt/freecalypso directory and chown it
       to your non-root uid.

   4B: Run 'make install' as your regular uid; it should succeed because you
       should have made yourself the owner of /opt/freecalypso with full write
       permission in the previous step.

   5B: You are done!

The host tool binaries will be installed in /opt/freecalypso/bin; you can
either add this directory to your PATH or make symlinks from /usr/bin or
/usr/local/bin or wherever.

Dependencies
============

All FreeCalypso host tools are written in plain C and have absolutely no
library dependencies beyond libc.  In other words, they are very friendly to
those who like bare bones minimalist systems.

The previous dependency on OpenSSL libraries for DES decryption of the factory
IMEI record on the Pirelli DP-L10 has been eliminated by incorporating our own
simple DES implementation (performance is not a concern for the one time
operation of retrieving the factory IMEI) into our rvinterf/etmsync source, and
the functions that require access to Pirelli's IMEI have now been integrated
into fc-fsio.

Previous versions of this FC host tools package included a UI development aid
utility called fc-lcdemu which needs libX11 to compile and an X11 display to
run; this utility has now been moved to a separate freecalypso-ui-dev
repository and is no longer a part of the core FC host tools package.

CC= and CFLAGS= selection
=========================

Our Makefile hierarchy is set up to build with CC=gcc and CFLAGS=-O2 by default.
If you need to change either or both of these selections, you can do it by
adding CC= and/or CFLAGS= on the make invokation line, for example:

make CC=mygcc CFLAGS="-g -O2 -whatever-options"

libserial and Linux specifics
=============================

We have our own private library called libserial which contains our serial port
handling code (serial ports are what we use to talk to Calypso GSM devices),
and this library exists in several different versions.  At the top level of our
source tree libserial is a symlink to one of libserial-* versions.

Starting with fc-host-tools-r7, the default version of libserial (i.e., the
version to which the libserial symlink points in the official release source)
is libserial-linux.  This version of libserial has the advantage of supporting
high GSM baud rates (see doc/High-speed-serial) with FTDI adapters without
needing a dirty patch to the in-kernel driver, but it comes at the price of
being very specific to Linux.  If you would like to run FreeCalypso host tools
under FreeBSD, illumos or some other alternative-to-Linux OS, see the section
titled "Support for other Unix flavors" in the doc/High-speed-serial article.

Target binaries
===============

If you are installing a packaged release of FreeCalypso host tools, there will
be a number of prebuilt target binaries (code to be run on the Calypso ARM7
processor) in the target-bin directory; when you run make install as instructed
above, these target binaries will be installed in /opt/freecalypso/target-bin.
Otherwise, you will need to compile them yourself using an ARM7 toolchain as
detailed below.

Building and installing the ARM7 toolchain
==========================================

The current "official" GNU ARM toolchain for FreeCalypso consists of
binutils-2.21.1, gcc-4.5.4 and newlib-2.0.0 with a specific set of patches and
build configuration options.  This toolchain is used to compile target-utils in
this package as well as our separately-maintained experimental FC Selenite
firmware.  (Our production firmwares are currently built with TI's TMS470
toolchain instead.)  Build it as follows:

1. Download these 3 source tarballs for the standard GNU+newlib components:

   binutils-2.21.1a.tar.bz2
   gcc-core-4.5.4.tar.bz2
   newlib-2.0.0.tar.gz

2. Run the build+install.sh script in the toolchain directory.  Read the
   comments in the script first for the usage instructions.

The toolchain thus built will need to be in your PATH before you can compile
target-utils or FC Selenite.  The officially recommended install location for
this toolchain is /opt/freecalypso/gcc.

Please note: the toolchain that is prescribed for FreeCalypso as above is
*believed* to be equivalent to the one used by OsmocomBB, but there are no
guarantees.  Use any other toolchain at your own risk.

Compiling target-utils
======================

Running 'make' in the target-utils tree with the ARM7 toolchain present in your
PATH will result in several target binaries being built, including compalstage
and loadagent which are needed in order to use FreeCalypso loadtools.  Run
'make install' to install these target binaries in /opt/freecalypso/target-bin,
which is where loadtools will look for them.

Run 'make all' in target-utils to build some additional target code pieces that
are needed only for development and only very rarely.

Staged installs
===============

As already explained above, our FC host tools need to be installed under
/opt/freecalypso on your system in order to function correctly, and this runtime
location is not changeable.  However, some users have requested an ability to
do a staged install: have the 'make install' operation install the finished
tree of files in some staging location, with the expectation that it will be
subsequently moved to /opt/freecalypso by some other mechanism.  One use case
that has been presented to us was automated building of binary distribution
packages on a build host where writing to /opt/freecalypso is not allowed.

If you need to make a staged install of this sort, you can do it like this:

make install INSTALL_PREFIX=/home/me/my-fc-staging-area

Please note that this INSTALL_PREFIX= scheme changes *only* the location where
'make install' will deposit the installable files; it does NOT change the
location where our programs will look for other programs and helper files: the
latter location is hard-coded as /opt/freecalypso is bazillion places throughout
our code base.