You will need to extract two different tar balls, either the ones provided on the cdrom or else by downloading them. When writing this post, I tried to use arm-linux-tools-20080623.tar.gz to build uClinux but ran into some unexpected behaviours. The objcopy generated extremly large vmlinux.bin files so if this happens, try the provided arm tools instead (arm-linux-tools-20061213.tar.gz).
NOTE: The uClinix dist delivered with the olimex board comes patched so it might be a good idea using it initially.

I assume that the development environment should be placed under /opt/arm so let’s start by creating that directory.
%> mkdir /opt/arm
%> cd /opt/arm

Extract the necessary tarballs.
%> tar -xvzf .../Utils/arm-linux-tools-20061213.tar.gz
%> tar -xvzf .../uClinux/uClinux-dist-lpc_2478_stk-20081007.tgz

For some reason, genromfs was not included with the tools chain delivered with the Olimex development board so if you can’t locate it, fetch it and build it like this.

%> wget http://www.uclinux.org/pub/uClinux/uclinux-elf-tools/gcc-3/uclinux-tools-20040603/genromfs-0.5.1.tar.gz
%> tar -xvzf genromfs-0.5.1.tar.gz
%> cd genromfs-0.5.1
%> make
%> cd ..

Before building uClinux we need to setup the PATH,
%> export PATH=/opt/arm/usr/local/bin:/opt/arm/genromfs-0.5.1:$PATH
%> cd uClinux-dist-lpc_2478_stk

and clean it before building.

%> make distclean
%> \rm -f tools/ucfront-g++
%> \rm -f tools/ucfront-gcc
%> \rm -f tools/ucfront-ld
%> \rm -f tools/cksum

Finally, it is time to build uClinux.
%> make menuconfig

Menu config

Now, just set Vendor/Product to NXP/LPC2468 by choosing Vendor/Product Selection —> Vendor -> NXP. LPC2468 will automatically be choosen since it is the only alternative.

NXP and LPC2468

Select Exit->Exit->Yes.

%> make dep
%> make

Hopefully everything went well and you probably have got a couple of images directly under the subdirectory images. Most likely romfs_5.img and vmlinux.bin. We need to add the uClinux tools directory to our path as well.
%> export PATH=/opt/arm/uClinux-dist-lpc_2478_stk/tools:$PATH

The new image files that we have created might be a good idea to use so you probably should copy them to tftps home catalogue so that you can boot from them instead.
%> cp images/romfs_5.img /home/tftp/romfs_new.img
%> cp images/vmlinux.bin /home/tftp/vmlinux_new.bin

Finally it is time to create our hello world program and the associated makefile for building it. Create some work directory, like /projects/Olimex/HelloWorld.

Create helloworld.c and the Makefile (or download them from here).

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
printf("\r\nHello world!\r\n");
return 0;
}

and create the Makefile

CC=ucfront-gcc arm-linux-gcc
LD=ucfront-gcc arm-linux-gcc

.PHONY=clean
clean:
 \rm -f *.o
 \rm -f *~


Remember that Makefiles are very obnoxious when it comes to whitespacing, all commands must start with a tab character and not spaces so if you get an error about missing separator, check that line if it contains leading spaces instead of a tab.

Try compiling the hello world application.
%> make

Hopefully the output will look something like this:

ucfront-gcc arm-linux-gcc -msoft-float -D__PIC__ -fpic -msingle-pic-base -Dlinux -D__linux__ -Dunix -D__uClinux__ -c helloworld.c
ucfront-gcc arm-linux-gcc -Wl,--fatal-warnings -Wl,-elf2flt -msoft-float -L/opt/arm/uClinux-dist-lpc_2478_stk/uClibc/lib -o helloworld helloworld.o -lc

Since we are going to use tftp to get the helloworld application to the dev-board, copy the program to tftps home directory.
%> cp helloworld /home/tftp/

Let’s try to get it over to our development board, so first we need to do a short recap on what was done in “Getting started with Olimex LPC2478″ but the short version is:

• Connect ethernet and rs232 cable to development board
• Write ‘picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0′ in a terminal
• Add power to the development board and hit any key while beeing in the picocom terminal within 3 seconds.
• tftpboot 0xa0800000 192.168.1.100:romfs_new.img
• tftpboot 0xa0008000 192.168.1.100:vmlinux_new.bin
• go a0008000

Since we are going to use tftp to get helloworld to the development board we need to start the eth0.
# /sbin/ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.20 up

You can test if ethernet is working by typing
# ping -c 1 192.168.1.100

Almost everything is read only so change directory to /var and fetch the helloworld application from the tftp server
# cd /var
# tftp -g -r helloworld 192.168.1.100
# chmod +x helloworld
# ./helloworld

Hello world!
#


That’s about it.

As I wrote previously, I had some problems with the tools chain and extremely large images. I still haven’t figured out why it occured and I can not find any bug reported on objcopy but this is how it looked when listing the size.
%> ls -la images/
....
-rw-r--r-- 1 anders anders 2686629728 2011-02-13 19:53 vmlinux.bin


As you can see, vmlinux.bin is quite huge.

Another odd problem I had when writing this post was that printf only sent garbage characters to the console. After a lot of searching I found out that the CFLAGS in the Makefile needed -D__PIC__ -fpic -msingle-pic-base.

The Olimex LPC2478 development board is fully packed with nice features and it even has a nice steel cover and it is quite easy to get it up and running.

You will need the following items.

Since the development board does not have sufficient non-volatile memory it is necessary to transfer the uClinix kernel and file system from an external resource every time the system is started. There are quite a few ways to do that but for now we will just do it over the network to get an easy start.

We will need to setup the development environment somewhat before we do anything else, my examples will be for ubuntu but it shouldn’t be much different to do it in other linuxes.

TFTP server

We are going to use the tftpboot method on the development board so we will have to install a tftp server.

# Install necessary packages
%> sudo apt-get install xinetd tftpd tftp
# Create some directory to store the boot images in
%> sudo mkdir /home/tftp
# Copy the images from the olimex CD to the tftp directory
%> sudo cp /media/cdrom0/Images/romfs_5.img /home/tftp/
%> sudo cp /media/cdrom0/Images/vmlinux.bin /home/tftp/
%> sudo chmod -R a+rwx /home/tftp
%> sudo chown -R nobody /home/tftp
# Create the tftp xinetd file
%> cat <<EOF > /tmp/dummytftp
service tftp {
socket_type = dgram
protocol = udp
wait = yes
user = nobody
server = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
server_args = /home/tftp
disable = no
}
EOF
%> sudo cp /tmp/dummytftp /etc/xinetd.d/tftp
%> sudo /etc/init.d/xinetd restart

Terminal

We will have to communicate with the development board through a serial terminal so let’s install picocom.

%> sudo apt-get install picocom

If everything looks like

you are still on track and it is time to load the images. You will have to figure out if the preset network parameters that are in the olimex development board will work with your network or not. The preset network information is 192.168.0.158 / 255.255.255.0. I am using 192.168.1.X network and have quite a lot of reserved addresses so I will use the following configuration.

Now we should just store a couple of environment variables in the flash memory on the LPC2478.

lpc-2478-stk # setenv serverip 192.168.1.102
lpc-2478-stk # setenv ipaddr 192.168.1.20
lpc-2478-stk # setenv gatewayip 192.168.1.1
lpc-2478-stk # saveenv

First we load the file system and then the kernel.

lpc-2478-stk # tftpboot 0xa0800000 192.168.1.102:romfs_5.img
lpc-2478-stk # tftpboot 0xa0008000 192.168.1.102:vmlinux.bin

The result will hopefully look like this

Finally we hope that everything will boot.

lpc-2478-stk # go a0008000

The display will look something like

That’s it, you have got a running uClinux and you got the world at your feets…

I will post more posts about the olimex development board in the future so drop in now and then.

With a solid track record in software development I can offer you assistance in several areas. I have more than 15 years of experience in software development, mostly C, Python and Java in various unices. Seven years has been in the mobile industry where half of the time was the service provisioning side and the other half was handset development. Six years has been various research and development projects in nowcasting systems.