Target Platform Requirements

This section describes the target device and build tool requirements for the phoneME Advanced build system. The following sections include build system recipes for specific target platforms.

As a technology, phoneME Advanced can address a variety of target devices. So in this section we will describe the common features of these target devices to help with understanding what kinds of devices phoneME Advanced is appropriate for. Later, we'll describe how to setup the build system for two example target devices.

Common Target Device Features

Target devices for phoneME Advanced technology are sometimes called resource-constrained devices. The table below describes some of the main features of these target devices:

The memory requirements for target devices vary too much to quote a helpful statistic. However, it may be useful to note that phoneME Advanced was designed to execute out of ROM for memory-constrained applications.

These requirements are described in greater detail in the CDC Porting Guide.

Target Build Toolchain Requirements

Like the host build tools, the target build tools can be discovered by the CDC build system with the CVM_TARGET_TOOLS_PREFIX. This build system variable helps identify the required target build tools described in the following table:

In some cases, these tools can be combined. For example, with the Linux x86/PC example in the host build section, gcc takes on the role of the C compiler, the assembler and the linker.

When building phoneME Advanced for a new target platform, you must first acquire target build tools that are appropriate for the target platform. In many cases, particularly for Linux variants, this requirement can be satisfied with a cross-compiler toolchain based on gcc and binutils. The CDC build system has been tested with several recent versions of the GCC compiler, especially 4.x and 3.x. The recipes in this quickstart guide include examples based on this approach.

For some platforms you'll need to get these tools from a board vendor or partner, so we also include an example based on Microsoft developer tools.

Note that the target toolchain should also include header files and libraries that are appropriate for the target device.

Target Device Notes

Note: The phoneME Advanced technology has been built and tested with Linux/x86 as well as several target devices.

Each target device for phoneME Advanced technology reflects an OS/CPU combination that requires certain resources from the target platform development environment:

• A compatible target compiler.

• Target system libraries and header files.

• [Optional] A target-specific version of the Qt library and header files.

• A set of UNIX build utilities compatible with the CDC build system.

The first two of these requirements are usually provided by the device vendor. For example, a development board vendor might provide an SDK with a compiler, libraries and header files for a specific development board or they might make reference to a third-party toolchain. Qt is included as a prebuilt component for most Linux distributions. But building this library for an alternate target device requires the same kind of SDK resources as described above. The procedures to build Qt are described in the Qt reference documentation. Finally, the UNIX utilities needed by the CDC build system are provided by most current Linux distributions like Ubuntu.

The source code layout and build system procedures for target devices are described in the CDC Build System Guide.

ARM CPU Notes

• ARM v4 or higher
• AAPCS (new) or APCS calling conventions
• VFP (new) or soft float

By default, the CDC build system assumes APCS calling conventions.

MIPS CPU Notes

• 32-bit using o32 calling conventions

Note: Most MIPS cores are 64-bit, but are run in 32-bit mode.