jdelaney-adi
commented
3 weeks ago Having had specific needs to do such host-based unit testing using and within CMSIS packs, I have been working on a solution that adds support for native toolchain targets to the CMSIS-Toolbox.
For example, we have added support for native toolchain(s) as described here and then used a combination of build and target types to achieve native(host) and hardware-based build targets in csolution and cproject files.
Something that might help would be to standardise compiler/toolchain naming conventions so that even if the tools aren't distributed with support for every compiler available, there is a clear way for vendors to a) provide components that are compatible across compilers (or variants for different toolchains) and b) distribute toolchain support (.cmake) files for the CMSIS-Toolbox that support various toolchains.
Here are are couple of things we've found while trying to implement this approach:
- One pain point right now is that to add support for a new toolchain you must create and store a .cmake file inside the /etc directory. It would be nice to be able to provide a CMSIS_EXTRA_TOOLCHAINS variable that points to additional toolchains and build scripts.
- After adding support for x86 GCC only a .elf file was produced and after looking into the way cbuildgen works there was no way to provide alternate suffixes for output file types. It would be nice to be able to configure output binary types or suffix mappings from the toolchain .cmake file.
ReinhardKeil
The Problem To Be Solved
During testing of high-level software stacks it is useful to test and develop functionality on host computers (i.e. Linux). This allows to verify functionality and once it is tested, the final hardware target (microcontroller) could be used.
While the CMSIS-Toolbox supports the notion of layers, it is currently not possible to target host computers. The effort for this should be investigated as I recommend to target CMSIS-Toolbox 3.0 for this feature.