Anjuta+Poky Integration
Yesterday I tested and rolled a new release of the Poky integration plugin for Anjuta, created by our fearless Sir Bradford. This is a very special piece of magic which lets you use a Poky SDK in Anjuta to cross-compile binaries without any pain, and will even deploy, execute and debug the binaries in a QEMU for testing. As part of the release process I had to test it, so I'll step through what I did as a brief tutorial on how to use Anjuta with Poky.
The prerequisites are Anjuta, the Anjuta Poky SDK plugin, and QEMU. These are all available for installation from our Debian repository for Debian/Ubuntu users, everyone else will have to build from source, sorry! You'll also need a Poky ARM SDK and QEMU ARM images from the Poky web site. The SDK is a tarball which contains a cross compiler with base libraries (glibc, GTK+, and so on) and should be extracted onto your machine (it extracts the SDK into /usr/local/poky). The QEMU image consists of a kernel and a ext3 file system which will boot Poky inside QEMU.
To start I fetched a checkout of Tasks and loaded up Anjuta. I don't have an existing Anjuta project for Tasks, so I used File → New → Project From Existing Sources to create a project using the checkout. At this point I could do native development using Build → Run Configure and Build → Build Project to configure and compile the source, but we want to cross-compile.
To activate cross compiling go to Edit → Preferences → General → Installed Plugins and enable the Poky SDK plugin. This will add a new page Poky SDK to the preferences dialog. We're using an external toolchain so set the SDK root to /usr/local/poky/eabi-glibc/arm and the toolchain triplet to arm-poky-linux-gnueabi. We're also using QEMU instead of a real device so set the paths to the kernel and root filesystem (remembering to uncompress the filesystem). We're now done configuring, so the preferences dialog can be closed. However notice that if you switch from using a SDK to building with a full Poky tree you can use the cross-compiler it produces directly, and you can also use an external device instead of QEMU: the only requirement is that you can SSH into it.
Now to do the build. Use Build → Run Configure to configure Tasks, passing any extra options you want. Note that if you want to debug your build in the future you'll need to enter CFLAGS=-g here to disable optimisation (autoconf sets -O2 -g by default, which isn't useful for debugging). The configure script is then ran with the right environment and options for cross compiling, and with any luck will successfully configure. Then hit Build → Build Project and watch the cross-compiler do its thing. When that has worked, you can prove to yourself that the right thing has happened.
$ file tasks tasks: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), for GNU/Linux 2.6.14, dynamically linked (uses shared libs), not stripped
We have an ARM binary, ready for deployment. Start the virtual machine with Tools → Start QEMU (this may ask for your root password to configure networking) and once it has booted you can install the project into the VM with Tools → Deploy. This will run make install to a temporary directory and then rsync it to the VM. Now you can either interact with the VM directly (if the application installed a new desktop file, then it should appear on the desktop), or use Tools → Run Remote to execute a binary directly: entering tasks will execute the freshly installed Tasks. Neat, huh?
For the final trick there is even GDB integration. Tools → Debug Remote will let you specify a local binary (to extract debug symbols from, say src/gtk/tasks) and a remote binary to run, and then start a GDB on the VM and connect to it. The binary will be initially running but paused at the entrypoint, so you can add breakpoints and then continue execution.
Hopefully this post has been a good overview of the integration available between Poky and Anjuta. In the future I hope to see Nemiver integrated into Anjuta, and gdbserver support in Nemiver, which would be a killer combination for Poky integration.
NP: One On Twoism, Various
