Building OFW for ARM
This page tells how to build Open Firmware for an ARM target system.
Host System Requirements
During the Open Firmware build process, the Forth system inside OFW is executed several times to extend itself. Those steps must run on the same CPU instruction set (in this case ARM) as the final target. So you must build OFW either on an ARM computer or by using an ARM instruction set emulator running on some other computer. [QEMU] works well for this purpose.
Compiler Setup for Native ARM Host
To compile on an ARM host, you need Linux on that host, along with the GNU toolchain (GCC and GNU make) plus the Subversion version control system.
Compiler Setup for x86 Host
To compile on an x86 host, you need everything listed for the native host (Linux, GNU toolchain, and Subversion), plus QEMU.
To install QEMU:
- Debian: sudo apt-get install qemu
- Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy): sudo apt-get install qemu
- Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic): sudo apt-get install qemu qemu-kvm-extras
- Fedora: sudo yum install qemu-user
In general, the file that you need is "qemu-arm". You can use commands like (Fedora) "yum whatprovides qemu-arm" or (Debian/Ubuntu) "apt-file search qemu-arm" to work out which top-level package to install.
For Fedora, you might also need to temporarily disable SELinux security before OFW compilation:
sudo /usr/sbin/setenforce 0
Building Open Firmware
Get the Open Firmware source:
svn co svn://openfirmware.info/openfirmware
Build OFW:
cd openfirmware/cpu/arm/mmp2/build make
The last line of the compilation output should say something like:
--- Saving as ofw.rom
That tells you the name of the output file.
There are some other build directories like "cpu/arm/versatilepb/build". At the time of this writing, they have not been fixed up to "do the right thing" with the emulated build environment. The Makefile in cpu/arm/mmp2/build is the current "gold standard" for the build automation.