Enabling the (new) Development Host

Before any required tools are installed on the development host, the basic development configuration for the host must be established for OpenCPI. This process starts with the same initial steps as outlined in the OpenCPI Installation Guide: installing the git package, enabling your user for sudo, and downloading the OpenCPI source tree using the git clone command.

A binary/packaged distribution of OpenCPI such as RPM is not appropriate for enabling a new development host: a source installation is required.

The steps required for any software platform (development host or embedded GPP), is described in the next section, Enabling GPP Platforms. The primary aspects that are different with the development host are:

  • The OpenCPI source tree lives on the development host (or is accessible to it).

  • The C++ compilation tool chain is self hosted, rather than cross-compiled.

  • A number of development-related software packages must be specified and installed in the Platform Package Installation Script, such as make, and python3. Such tools are neither required nor expected on embedded platforms.

  • When the development host platform is defined for OpenCPI, the top-level installation script, scripts/install-opencpi.sh, can both install as well as test the system.

For a new development host, the operating system installation/configuration should be defined and documented, usually requiring at least some manual steps. This should, at a minimum, be described in the README file in the platform’s directory. Development hosts that are likely to be used by others are usually established in the core built-in project.

If a new development host is a variant or new version of an existing supported one, the task is usually modest. However, a development host actually “hosts” other development tools for other platforms (e.g. FPGA tools), and OpenCPI requires certain other tools to be installed (e.g. python3). Thus testing and specifying how all the required packages are installed, and whether various FPGA tools can be installed and run, can be time consuming. OpenCPI already has support for various versions of Rocky and Ubuntu.