Ciro Santilli Zephyr is cool. Its installation setup is annoying. But the project is cool.
Real hardware is for newbs. Real hardware is for newbs.
Tested on Ubuntu 23.10 we approximately follow instructions from: docs.zephyrproject.org/3.4.0/develop/getting_started/index.html stopping before the "Flash the sample" section, as we don't flash QEMU. We just run it.
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends git cmake ninja-build gperf \
ccache dfu-util device-tree-compiler wget \
python3-dev python3-pip python3-setuptools python3-tk python3-wheel xz-utils file \
make gcc gcc-multilib g++-multilib libsdl2-dev libmagic1
python3 -m venv ~/zephyrproject/.venv
source ~/zephyrproject/.venv/bin/activate
pip install west
west init ~/zephyrproject
cd ~/zephyrproject
west update
west zephyr-export
cd ~
wget https://github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng/releases/download/v0.16.1/zephyr-sdk-0.16.1_linux-x86_64.tar.xz
tar xvf zephyr-sdk-0.16.1_linux-x86_64.tar.xz
cd zephyr-sdk-0.16.1
./setup.shThe installation procedure install all compiler toolchains for us, so we can then basically compile for any target. It also fetches the latest Git source code of Zephyr under:
~/zephyrproject/zephyrThe "most default" blinky hello world example which blinks an LED is a bit useless for us because QEMU doesn't have LEDs, so instead we are going to use one of the UART examples which will print characters we can see on QEMU stdout.
Let's start with the hello world example on an x86 target:
and it outputs:
The
cd ~/zephyrproject/zephyr
west build -b qemu_x86 samples/hello_world -t runHello World! qemu_x86qemu_x64 on the output comes from the CONFIG_BOARD macro github.com/zephyrproject-rtos/zephyr/blob/c15ff103001899ba0321b2c38013d1008584edc0/samples/hello_world/src/main.c#L11
#include <zephyr/kernel.h>
int main(void)
{
printk("Hello World! %s\n", CONFIG_BOARD);
return 0;
}The
qemu_x86 board is documented at: docs.zephyrproject.org/3.4.0/boards/x86/qemu_x86/doc/index.htmlYou can also first
cd into the directory that you want to build in to avoid typing samples/hello_world all the time:
cd ~/zephyrproject/zephyr/samples/hello_world
zephyr west build -b qemu_x86 -t runYou can also build and run separately with:
west build -b qemu_x86
west build -t runAnother important option is:
But note that it does not modify your
west build -t menuconfigprj.conf automatically for you.Let's try on another target:
and same output, but on a completely different board! The
rm -rf build
zephyr west build -b qemu_cortex_a53 -t runqemu_cortex_a53 board is documented at: docs.zephyrproject.org/3.4.0/boards/arm64/qemu_cortex_a53/doc/index.htmlThe list of all examples can be seen under:
which for example contains:
ls ~/zephyrproject/zephyr/sampleszephyrproject/zephyr/samples/hello_worldSo run another sample simply select it, e.g. to run
zephyrproject/zephyr/samples/synchronization:
west build -b qemu_cortex_a53 samples/synchronization -t run