Installing
The first step to get started with NuttX is to install a series of required tools, a toolchain for the architecture you will be working with and, finally, download NuttX source code itself.
Prerequisites
First, install the following set of system dependencies according to your Operating System:
Run the following command to install packages:
$ sudo apt install \
bison flex gettext texinfo libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev xxd \
gperf automake libtool pkg-config build-essential gperf genromfs \
libgmp-dev libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libisl-dev binutils-dev libelf-dev \
libexpat-dev gcc-multilib g++-multilib picocom u-boot-tools util-linux
Run the following command to install packages:
$ brew install x86_64-elf-gcc # Used by simulator
$ brew install u-boot-tools # Some platform integrate with u-boot
If you are are building Apache NuttX on Windows and using WSL follow that installation guide for Linux. This has been verified against the Ubuntu 18.04 version.
There may be complications interacting with programming tools over USB. Recently support for USBIP was added to WSL 2 which has been used with the STM32 platform, but it is not trivial to configure: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb
Download and install Cygwin using the minimal installation in addition to these packages:
make bison libmpc-devel
gcc-core byacc automake-1.15
gcc-g++ gperf libncurses-devel
flex gdb libmpfr-devel
git unzip zlib-devel
KConfig frontend
NuttX configuration system uses KConfig which is exposed via a series of interactive menu-based frontends, part of the kconfig-frontends
package. Depending on your OS you may use a precompiled package or you will have to build it from source, which is available in the NuttX tools repository:
$ apt install kconfig-frontends
$ git clone https://bitbucket.org/nuttx/tools.git $ cd tools/kconfig-frontends $ # on MacOS do the following: $ patch < ../kconfig-macos.diff -p 1 $ ./configure --enable-mconf --disable-shared --enable-static --disable-gconf --disable-qconf --disable-nconf $ # on Linux do the following: $ ./configure --enable-mconf --disable-nconf --disable-gconf --disable-qconf $ make $ make install
NuttX also supports kconfiglib <https://github.com/ulfalizer/Kconfiglib> by default, which is a Kconfig tool implemented in Python 2/3. Compared with kconfig-frontends, kconfiglib provides NuttX with the possibility of multi-platform support(configure NuttX in Winodws native/Visual Studio), and also kconfiglib has a stronger Kconfig syntax check, this will help developers to avoid some Kconfig syntax errors. Install kconfiglib via following command:
$ pip install kconfiglib
If you are a working on Windows, which also need the support of windows-curses:
$ pip install windows-curses
Tip
It should be noted that kconfiglib does not support modules attributes.
(<https://github.com/ulfalizer/Kconfiglib/blob/master/kconfiglib.py#L3239-L3254>,
the community seems to have stopped updating), if the features depends on
CONFIG_BUILD_LOADABLE
, kconfiglib may not be a good choice.
Toolchain
To build Apache NuttX you need the appropriate toolchain according to your target platform. Some Operating Systems such as Linux distribute toolchains for various architectures. This is usually an easy choice however you should be aware that in some cases the version offered by your OS may have problems and it may better to use a widely used build from another source.
The following example shows how to install a toolchain for ARM architecture:
$ apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi binutils-arm-none-eabi
First, create a directory to hold the toolchain:
$ usermod -a -G users $USER
$ # get a login shell that knows we're in this group:
$ su - $USER
$ sudo mkdir /opt/gcc
$ sudo chgrp -R users /opt/gcc
$ sudo chmod -R u+rw /opt/gcc
$ cd /opt/gcc
Download and extract toolchain:
$ HOST_PLATFORM=x86_64-linux # use "mac" for macOS.
$ # For Windows there is a zip instead (gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major-win32.zip)
$ curl -L -O https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/9-2019q4/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major-${HOST_PLATFORM}.tar.bz2
$ tar xf gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major-${HOST_PLATFORM}.tar.bz2
Add the toolchain to your PATH:
$ echo "export PATH=/opt/gcc/gcc-arm-none-eabi-9-2019-q4-major/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
You can edit your shell’s rc files if you don’t use bash.
Tip
There are hints on how to get the latest tool chains for most supported architectures in the Apache NuttX CI helper script and Docker container
Todo
Required toolchain should be part of each arch documentation (see relevant issue).
Download NuttX
Apache NuttX is actively developed on GitHub. There are two main repositories, nuttx and apps, where the latter is technically optional (but recommended for complete set of features). If you intend to contribute changes, you need the absolute latest version or you simply prefer to work using git, you should clone these repositories (recommended). Otherwise you can choose to download any stable release archive.
$ mkdir nuttxspace
$ cd nuttxspace
$ git clone https://github.com/apache/nuttx.git nuttx
$ git clone https://github.com/apache/nuttx-apps apps
The development source code is also available as a compressed archive, should you need it:
$ mkdir nuttxspace
$ cd nuttxspace
$ curl -L https://github.com/apache/nuttx/tarball/master -o nuttx.tar.gz
$ curl -L https://github.com/apache/nuttx-apps/tarball/master -o apps.tar.gz
$ tar zxf nuttx.tar.gz --one-top-level=nuttx --strip-components 1
$ tar zxf apps.tar.gz --one-top-level=apps --strip-components 1
There are also .zip
archives available (useful for Windows users): just replace tarball
with
zipball
.
Go to releases and choose a version to download. The following example uses version 10.1.0:
$ mkdir nuttxspace
$ cd nuttxspace
$ curl -L https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/nuttx/12.0.0/apache-nuttx-12.0.0.tar.gz?action=download -o nuttx.tar.gz
$ curl -L https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/nuttx/12.0.0/apache-nuttx-apps-12.0.0.tar.gz?action=download -o apps.tar.gz
$ tar zxf nuttx.tar.gz
$ tar zxf apps.tar.gz