Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

I guess it's time to finally announce libopenstm32, a Free Software firmware library for STM32 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontrollers me and a few other people have been working on in recent weeks. The library is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 3 or later (yes, that's an intentional decision after some discussions we had).

The code is available via git:

 $ git clone git://libopenstm32.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/libopenstm32/libopenstm32
 $ cd libopenstm32
 $ make

Building is done using a standard ARM gcc cross-compiler (arm-elf or arm-none-eabi for instance), see the summon-arm-toolchain script for the basic idea about how to build one.

The current status of the library is listed in the wiki. In short: some parts of GPIOs, UART, I2C, SPI, RCC, Timers and some other basic stuff works and has register definitions (and some convenience functions, but not too many, yet). We're working on adding support for more subsystems, any help with this is highly welcome of course! Luckily ARM stuff (and especially the STM32) has pretty good (and freely available) datasheets.

We have a few simple example programs, e.g. for the Olimex STM32-H103 eval board (see photo). JTAG flashing can be done using OpenOCD, for example.

Feel free to join the mailing lists and/or the #libopenstm32 IRC channel on Freenode.

The current list of projects where we plan to use this library is Open-BLDC (an Open Hardware / Free Software brushless motor controller project by Piotr Esden-Tempski), openmulticopter (an Open Hardware / Free Software quadrocopter/UAV project), openbiosprog (an Open Hardware / Free Software BIOS chip flash programmer I'm in the process of designing using gEDA/PCB), and probably a few more.

If you plan to work on any new (or existing) microcontroller hardware- or software-projects involving an STM32 microcontroller, please consider using libopenstm32 (it's the only Free Software library for this microcontroller family I know of) and help us make it better and more complete. Thanks!

Here's a nice opportunity for everyone to learn more about coreboot, a Free Software / Open Source firmware/BIOS for x86 PCs.

Ron Minnich, founder of the LinuxBIOS (now called coreboot) project, Peter Stuge of Stuge Konsult, and Stefan Reinauer of coresystems GmbH have given a presentation for the Google Tech Talks series recently. The topic was (of course) coreboot, its history, goals, features and technical details, surrounding tools and libraries such as flashrom and libpayload, as well as an automated test system for running a hardware test-suite upon every checkin in the coreboot repository.

A video of the talk, aptly named coreboot (aka LinuxBIOS): The Free/Open-Source x86 Firmware (134 MB), is available from Youtube, get it for instance via:

  $ apt-get install youtube-dl
  $ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X72LgcMpM9k

The talk includes various demos of coreboot and various payloads you can use with coreboot. One nice example is the TINT payload, a Tetris-like game for Linux (apt-get install tint for the curious), which has been reworked to be usable as a coreboot payload.

So, yes, you can now put Tetris in your BIOS ROM chip and play it from there (no hard drive required).

Other demos included some cluster nodes with coreboot, and a "normal" x86 desktop board booting coreboot + Linux in a very few seconds (much room left for optimizing there though, if you really want to get into fast booting).

Check out the full talk for more infos, and if you're willing to give it a try (see the list of currently supported boards), contact us on the mailing list or join the #coreboot IRC channel on Freenode.

Public Service Announcement: The LinuxBIOS project, a Free Software project which intends to replace the proprietary BIOS found in most computers these days, has been renamed to coreboot.

The old name has become quite a misnomer in recent years; the name LinuxBIOS created the impression that it's a drop-in BIOS-replacement and that it's using Linux or is Linux-specific in any way. Neither is the case.

• coreboot is not a BIOS in the sense that it provides the legacy BIOS callbacks / interrupt routines. Instead, coreboot is just a small hardware initialization firmware. It does some basic hardware init, then hands over control to one of many possible payloads. This can be a boot loader such as FILO (or GRUB2, which shall ultimately replace FILO) if you want to boot from disk, or Plan 9, or memtest86, or a Linux kernel, or OpenBIOS/OpenFirmware/SmartFirmware, or...
• coreboot is not Linux or Linux-specific. Yes, it can indeed use Linux kernels as payload (i.e., you put the Linux kernel in your flash ROM chip together with coreboot) or boot a Linux kernel indirectly using FILO/GRUB2. But as mentioned above it can also be used (together with the fitting payload) to boot other OSes or systems such as Plan 9, Windows, FreeBSD, and others.

The initial author and project leader of LinuxBIOS/coreboot, Ron Minnich, explains in more detail why the renaming was done in his original announcement on the coreboot mailing list.

Hm, time for some nostalgia. The original Sim City game is now GPL'd under the new name Micropolis, and currently being packaged for Debian. There goes my 3.7 minutes of spare time per day...

If you're into such games, the Lincity clone has been around for some time now, too. And, as I found out yesterday, there's also Lincity-NG, which is a more recent clone with better (3D/isometric) graphics, sound, etc.

$ apt-get install lincity-ng

(run it as lincity-ng --sdl if you don't have 3D-accelerated drivers)

Have fun!

I got bored recently, so I rebuilt the whole Debian archive on one of my machines. To make this not a completely useless excercise, I used the Open64 compiler instead of gcc and created build logs for your perusal.

So what is Open64?

From the Wikipedia page:

Open64 is an open source, state-of-art, optimizing compiler for the Intel IA-64 (Itanium), AMD Opteron and Intel IA-32e architecture. It derives from the SGI compilers for the MIPS R10000 processor. It was released under the GPL in 2000, and now mostly serves as a research platform for compiler and computer architecture research groups. Open64 is licensed under the GPL. Open64 supports Fortran 77/95 and C/C++, as well as the shared memory programming model OpenMP. It can conduct high-quality interprocedural analysis, data flow analysis, data dependence analysis and array region analysis.

Open64 installation

The installation is pretty easy fortunately:

$ wget http://ovh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open64/open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ tar xfvj open64-4.0-src.tar.bz2
$ cd open64-4.0
$ export TOOLROOT=/opt/open64
$ make
$ make install (as root)

I think you need gcc-3.4 (gcc 4.x is not yet supported), and for some odd reason you also need csh as one of the install scripts seems to use it.

It would be nice if someone could package Open64 for Debian, I definately don't have the time to maintain such a huge package (a whole maintainer team would probably be good here).

Rebuilding the Debian archive

There are several possible ways (and tools) to rebuild the Debian archive; I've used pbuilder/cowbuilder with the rebuild scripts from Bastian Venthur, which are now included in pbuilder.

First we need to install the required packages, setup a cowbuilder base chroot, and get the list of packages:

$ apt-get install cowdancer grep-dctrl wget devscripts sudo
$ cowbuilder --create --distribution lenny --basepath /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cp -r /usr/share/doc/pbuilder/examples/rebuild .
$ cd rebuild
$ ./getlist lenny

Now we add Open64 into the cowbuilder chroot and fix up the chroot by pointing the gcc/g++ symlinks to Open64:

$ cp -a /opt/open64 /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow/opt
$ chroot /var/cache/pbuilder/testing-base.cow
$ cd /usr/bin
$ mv gcc gcc.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/opencc gcc
$ mv g++ g++.orig
$ ln -s /opt/open64/bin/openCC g++
$ exit

In addition, we set the CC and CXX environment variables to Open64, which will make 90% of all (autoconf-using) packages automatically use Open64. We need a small script for that:

$ cat c.cfg:
export CC="/opt/open64/bin/opencc -m32"
export CXX="/opt/open64/bin/openCC -m32"

Now edit the buildall script. Change the Debian mirror used there (optional) and make it use our c.cfg script by adding the --configfile /path/to/rebuild/c.cfg option in the "pdebuild" line.

We can now finally start building the archive:

./buildall list.lenny.i386 lenny

You can also run multiple buildall instances at once to speed up the archive rebuild on SMP/multicore machines, and you can even abort the command and simply restart it later. The script will continue where it left off.

Results

The whole rebuild (with 2 instances of buildall running at the same time) took ca. 9 days on an AMD64 Athlon64 X2 (dual core, 1.8 GHz each) machine with 1 GB of RAM.

I really should have used something like apt-proxy to speed up the rebuild and save some bandwidth, but I read about apt-proxy too late...

All log files from my rebuild are available for detailed analysis if anybody is interested (you can browse the logfiles online or download all of them as tarball). I didn't perform any detailed analysis, just some rough numbers here:

• Succeeded package builds: 8425
• Failed package builds: 2509
• Total number of packages rebuilt: 10934

If anybody does some more elaborate analysis, please let me know.