Exploring BeagleBone, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 7Cross-Compilation, Eclipse, and Building Linux

To this point in the book, all of the code is built and executed directly on the Beagle boards. However, for larger projects this can be impractical, as you may need to manage many source files within a single project. In addition, compilation times can be slow on the Beagle boards for building large projects. This chapter first describes how you can use your desktop computer to develop applications that can be deployed directly to any Beagle board. The Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE) is then introduced, which allows for advanced development capabilities, such as remote debugging. The chapter finishes by outlining how you can build and deploy a custom Linux kernel.

EQUIPMENT REQUIRED FOR THIS CHAPTER:

• A Linux (ideally Debian 9+) stand-alone or virtual machine (VM) desktop instance (see Chapter 3)
• Any Beagle board for deployment and debugging

Further details on this chapter are available at www.exploringbeaglebone.com/chapter7/.

Setting Up a Cross-Compilation Toolchain

This section describes how you can establish a full-featured cross-compilation environment for building code for the Beagle boards using your desktop computer. A typical C/C++ compiler that is executed on a desktop computer (e.g., Intel x86) will build executable machine code for that platform only. Therefore, a cross-compiler is required, as it is capable of creating executable code for the ARM platform directly from your desktop computer, ...