Embedded Systems

Tools part 2

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 Getting Started …

Please make sure not to exert so much effort

studying this material as its main goal not to
deliver information, but to evaluate your
comprehensive ability through the assessment
exam held after that.

It also helps us determining your ability to self

study some topics that gives alot of aid
determining the course execution nature that
suits you the best.

Osama Shaaban- Embedded Systems Training Manager

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 Simulator

•Simulator: is used to simulate the behaviour of the

hardware without the existence of the hardware itself.
•It is a software on the PC in order to expect the behaviour
of the MC.

•The simulator can understand the assembly instruction of

the MC and it acts as if it was the MC and start changing the
contents of RAM, Registers according to the code.

•The simulator can’t simulate the real time property of the

embedded system.

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 Simulator – Cont’

•Simulator can be used to calculate the time consumbed by

a part of code by calculating the number of cycles consumed
to execute this code, and using the info of the frequency of
the system, we could calculate a expected time for the code.

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 Emulator

•Emulator is a certain hardware for a specific family of

controllers.

•It contains the max RAM & ROM size and all the prepherals
and registers the could exist in a microcontroller in this
family.

•It is FPGA that implement the core of the MC.

•It premits the programmer to make a hardware breakpoint

and halt the hardware registers, so the programmer simply
could debug the constraints in realtime manners.

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 In Circuit Emulator

•Simply it is the emulator connected to the board as if it is

the MC itself and at this time I could emulate the I/O ports
and other functionalities in my system.

•It is done by make the board without the MC then connect

the emulateor in the MC place.

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 Debugger

•It is a way to see what the controller is doing and it is a

hardware, but it is different from the emulator that it can’t
emulate the MC.

•The debugger is connected to a complete board and the

user only able to read the changes done inside the registers
and the memory of the controller.

•It communicate with a software on the PC through any kind

of protocols like JTAG or serial.

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 Debugging Info

The Debug Info helps debuggers to analyze the internal

layout of the debugged application. In particular, it helps the
debugger to locate addresses of variables and functions,
display values of variables (including complex structures
and classes with nontrivial binary layout), and map raw
addresses in the executable to the lines of the source code.

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 Debugging Info - Example

•Functions and variables :

For every function or variable, debug information stores
its location and name.

•Source file and line information :

This kind of information maps every line of every source file to the
corresponding location in the executable. (Of course it is possible
that a source line does not have the corresponding location at all
(e.g. a comment line). Such lines are not present in debug
information).

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 Debugging Info - Example

Type information :
For every function or variable, debug information can store
additional information about its type. For a variable or a function
parameter, this information will tell the debugger whether it is an
integer, or a string, or a user defined type, and so on. For a
function, it will tell the number of parameters, calling convention,
and the type of the function’s return value.

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 Programmer/Flasher

It is hardware used in order to Download the code to the

Microcontroller ROM(Flash/EEPROM).

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 Software Developing Environment
(IDE)

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 What is an IDE?

An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software

application that provides comprehensive facilities to
computer programmers for software development.

 Eclipse
 NetBeans
 MonoDevelop
 CodeWarrior

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 Components of IDE

An IDE normally consists of:

 Source code editor

 Compiler and/or Interpreter
 Build automation tools
 Debugger

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 Software Life Cycle

C Files C Files Object &

listing
Preprocessor Compiler Files
Exe File
Assembly Linker Map File
Files
Object
Assembler Files

Linker File

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 Source code editor

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 Preprocessor

Preprocessor
 The input to this phase is the .c File, .h Files
 The preprocess process the preprocessor keywords like
#define, #ifdef.... and generate a new .c File after the text
replacement process.
 The output of this phase is a .c File without any
preprocessor keyword.

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 Compiler

 A compiler is a computer program (or set of

programs) that transforms source code written
in a programming language (the source
language) into another computer language (the
target language).

 The most common reason for wanting to

transform source code is to create an
executable program.

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 Compiler (Cont..)

• Compiler
 The input to this phase .c File
 The compiler parse the code, and check the syntax
correctness of the file.
 Convert the .c Code into optimized machine language
code.
 The output of this phase is object file (.o File) and list file
(.lss file).
• List File:
Contain the corresponding assembly code for each line.

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 Compiler (Cont..)

 A Cross compiler is a compiler capable of

creating executable code for a platform other
than the one on which the compiler is running.

 Cross compiler tools are used to generate

executables for embedded system or multiple
platforms. It is used to compile for a platform
upon which it is not feasible to do the compiling,
like microcontrollers that don't support an
operating system

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 Compiler (Cont..)

GCC Compiler:
 GNU C Compiler, Started at 1987 as a part of
the GNU project
 Renamed to GNU Compiler Collection
 GCC is not only a Native Compiler but also it’s
a Cross Compiler
 GCC is ported to a wide variety of processor
architectures and is also available for most
embedded platforms

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 Compiler (Cont..)

Compilation Options:

gcc h2d.c –o h2d.exe ..quick and easy

gcc h2d.c –Wall –o h2d.exe ..get compiler warnings
gcc h2d.c –std=c99 –o h2d.exe ..use C99 standard

Note: options in any order, but “ –o h2d.exe” is one option

Example: gcc –o h2d.exe –std=c99 h2d.c

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 Compiler (Cont..)

gcc –E h2d.c
Produce preprocessed file(.i file) of h2d.c
gcc –S h2d.c
produce assembly code in h2d.s
gcc –c h2d.s
produce object code in h2d.o
gcc –o final.exe main.c aux1.s aux2.o
compile, assemble and link three files into one executable
gcc h2d.c –O2 –o h2d.exe
-O0, -O1, -O2, -O3 are optimization levels

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 Assembler

 An assembler creates object code by

translating assembly instruction mnemonics
into opcodes, and by resolving symbolic
names for memory locations and other
entities.

 Most assemblers include macro facilities for

performing textual substitution

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 Assembler (Cont..)

Assembler
 The input to this phase .asm File
 The Assembler coverts the assembly code to the
corresponding machine language code.
 The output of this phase is object file (.o File).

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 Assembler (Cont..)

 GAS : GNU Assembler

 The executable name of GAS is “as”
 It is the default back-end of GCC
 We use this command to generate the
object file out of the assembly file
as -o object_file.o code_file.s

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Linker

A Linker is a program that takes one or more

objects generated by a compiler and
combines them into a single executable
program

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Linker (Cont..)

•Linker
 The input to this phase multiple .O File
 The Linker merges different object files and library files.
 The linker allocate target memory (RAM, ROM, Stack)
 The linker produce the debug info
 The output of this phase is the executable file and the
map file.

The Map file format is mainly dependent on the linker, but in

general it contains the allocation of different object files in
the different memory segments.

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Linker (Cont..)

LD :
 Is a GNU linker
 Is a part of GCC “GNU Compiler Collection”
 Is responsible of doing the linking
operation.
 Is called automatically within the
compilation process.

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 Build Automation Tool

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Build automation

 Build automation is the act of scripting or

automating a wide variety of tasks that
software developers do in their day-to-day
activities including things like:
• compiling computer source code into binary
code.
• packaging binary code.
• running tests.
• deployment to production systems.
• creating documentation and/or release notes.

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Build automation (Cont..)

 One specific form of build automation is

the automatic generation of Makefiles.
 This is accomplished by tools like
• GNU Automake
• CMake
• Imake
• qmake
• nmake
• wmake
• OpenMake Meister

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Build automation (Cont..)

Why makefiles ?
 Let’s say that we have the following files “main.c”, “file1.c”
and “file2.c” to compile these files we should type the
following line in the the shell :
gcc -std=c99 -wall -o final.exe main.c file1.c file2.c

 We do the same thing every time we compile the files and

that may be time consuming so we recompile the changed
files only.

 So a tool to save the compilation time and decide which files

to be recompiled and which to be not, is strongly required.

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Build automation (Cont..)

GNU Automake
 GNU Automake is a programming tool that produces portable
makefiles for use by the make program, used in compiling
software.
 It is made by the Free Software Foundation as one of GNU
programs, and is part of the GNU build system.
 a script file called makefile is responsible of guiding make.
 The script file should be named “makefile”, “Makefile” or
“GNUmakefile”.
 The C file is recompiled if it has been changed or any of it’s
dependencies is changed

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Build automation (Cont..)

Project Compilation
 Done by the Makefile mechanism
 A makefile is a file (script) containing:
• Project structure (files, dependencies)
• Instructions for files creation
• The make command reads a makefile, understands the project
structure and makes up the executable
 Note that the Makefile mechanism is not limited to C
programs

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Build automation (Cont..)

Project structure
 Program contains 3 files
 main.c., sum.c, sum.h
 sum.h included in both .c files
 Executable should be the file sum

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Build automation (Cont..)

Group of lines
 Target: the file you want to create
 Dependencies: the files on which this file depends
 Command: what to execute to create the file (after a
TAB)
Testmath :: testmath.o mymath.o
gcc –o testmath testmath.o mymath.o

main.o: main.c sum.h

gcc –c main.c Rule
Dependency
Tab action
`
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Build automation (Cont..)

MakeFile
sum: main.o sum.o
gcc –o sum main.o sum.o

main.o: main.c sum.h

gcc –c main.c

sum.o: sum.c sum.h

gcc –c sum.c
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Build automation (Cont..)

MakeFile
.o depends (by default) on corresponding .c file. Therefore,
equivalent makefile is:

sum: main.o sum.o

gcc –o sum main.o sum.o
main.o: sum.h
gcc –c main.c
sum.o: sum.h
gcc –c sum.c
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Build automation (Cont..)

Make Operation
 Project dependencies tree is constructed
 Target of first rule should be created
 We go down the tree to see if there is a target that should
be recreated. This is the case when the target file is older than
one of its dependencies
 In this case we recreate the target file according to the action
specified, on our way up the tree. Consequently, more files
may need to be recreated
 If something is changed, linking is usually necessary

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Build automation (Cont..)

Make Operation
 make operation ensures minimum compilation, when the
project structure is written properly.

Do not write something like

prog: main.c sum1.c sum2.c
gcc –o prog main.c sum1.c sum2.c
which requires compilation of all project when something is
changed

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Build automation (Cont..)

Using Makefile
Example

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Build automation (Cont..)

Targets
 We can define multiple targets in a makefile
 Target clean – has an empty set of
dependencies. Used to clean intermediate
files.
 make
• Will execute the first target in make file
 make TARGET_NAME
• Will execute the action of this target
 make clean
• AMITWill
Prepared by: remove
Learning intermediate files(like .o Files)
 Eclipse IDE Integration

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Eclipse IDE Integration

 Create a New Project by selecting File >> New >>

Project
 Select the C Project Option and press Next

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

 From the project type menu select Makefile Project

 From the Tool chain menu select the compiler

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

 Add a new empty file to the project and name it

makefile
 Form the Make Target Section select your project then
click new make target

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

 Select the Taget name to be displayed in the Make

Target Section
 Select the target name as it’s written in the makefile

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

 Now the make target is ready, double click on it to

start the build

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Eclipse IDE Integration (Cont..)

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THANK YOU!