Behind the Scenes of the RTEMS Tool Binaries

I recently posted a long email to the RTEMS Users mailing list about what went into the building and distribution of the pre-built RTEMS Cross Development Tools.  I thought it would be interesting to clean that post up and turn it into a blog entry for posterity. 

I don't think most people in the community realize what goes on quietly behind the scenes for the tools. When someone installs a pre-built toolset, it is the result of Ralf Corsepius' ongoing effort. 

OAR hosts the RTEMS Build Farm and Ralf uses these machines to build the tools. When there is a change in a patch or tool revision, he very quickly responds and kicks off tool builds. I have no idea how long it takes for them to finish building but the number of individual toolset combinations is staggering when you consider the multipliers:

• number of target architectures (~10-12 depending on RTEMS version)
• number of host OS distributions and version
• SUSE
• CentOS/RHEL
• Fedora
• mingw32 
• Cygwin
• 32 and 64 bit hosts

Today there are 15 unique host variations for 4.11. This results in approximately 25GB of tool content for 4.11 on ftp.rtems.org. In addition, there are binary toolsets on the ftp site for release branches back to 4.6.  So the main ftp site has a LOT of stuff on it.

Ralf is very quick about getting new tool binaries out. Because of this, RTEMS is typically the first project to release binary tools after a binutils, gcc, or gdb release.  For gcc 4.6.0, he tracked the final release candidates so we were using the release image before the announcement. :-D 

After the tools land on the RTEMS FTP site, there are two yum mirrors of the rtems.org site:

rtems.eu [1]
rtems.info [2]

It can take hours for the mirror process to complete. Ralf has a script that checks the mirrors each hour.  This script emails those interested when things get out of sync.  The Yum repository for each RTEMS branch, distribution, OS version, and 32/64-bit variation is checked individually.  When a mirror out of sync for a variation, that single mirror is taken out of the yum mirror list for that variation until it has time to resynchronize. When a tool build is under way, I might get email for 8+ hours showing the progress of the synchronization.

Check out the Munin performance graphs for rtems.info to see how long a recent tool mirroring took.

This is what goes on behind the scenes to make the tool binaries available.  There is a different process for building the various tool chains, running the tests on them and reporting them to both the RTEMS Tool Test Results and GCC Test Results mailing lists.

If you would be interested in DVD distributions of the pre-built tools, let me know.

--joel

[1] rtems.eu is sponsored by Embedded Brains. I don't know its speed.

[2] rtems.info is my personal server and is sponsored by love and donations. It is an 8/1 Mbps connection which could be upgraded.