Developing STM32 microcontroller code on Linux (Part 5 of 8, building libopencm3)

The first post of this series covered the steps to build and run code for the STM32. The second post covered how to build a cross-compiler for the STM32. The third post covered how to build a debugger for the STM32. The fourth post covered building and configuring OpenOCD for your development environment. This post will cover building the device library, libopencm3.

As mentioned in the introductory post, it makes our life a lot easier if we use a device library. This is a library that abstracts the low-level details of the hardware registers away from us, and gives us a nice consistent API to use. While ST provides one these directly, it is not open-source (or more specifically, it's open-source status is murky). Luckily there is libopencm3, an open-source re-implementation that is also a better library in my opinion. As usual, I'm going to compile a certain version of libopencm3; newer or later versions may or may not work better for you.

As before, we start out by exporting some environment variables:

$ export TOPDIR=~/cross-src
$ export TARGET=arm-none-eabi
$ export PREFIX=~/opt/cross
$ export BUILDPROCS=$( getconf _NPROCESSORS_ONLN )
$ export PATH=$PREFIX/bin:$PATH

The TOPDIR environment variable is the directory in which the sources are stored. The TARGET environment variable is the architecture that we want our compiler to emit code for. For ARM chips without an operating system (like the STM32), we want arm-none-eabi. The PREFIX environment variable is the location we want our cross-compile tools to end up in; feel free to change this to something more suitable. The BUILDPROCS environment variable is the number of processors that we can use; we will use all of them while building to substantially speed up the build process. Finally, we need to add the location of the cross-compile binaries to our PATH so that later building stages can find it.

Now that we have our environment set up, we can get the code. Note that unlike most of the other tools covered in this tutorial, libopencm3 does not do releases. They expect (more specifically, require) that you clone the latest version and use that. That's what we are going to do here. As of this writing, the latest libopencm3 git hash tag is a909b5ca9e18f802e3caef19e63d38861662c128. Since the libopencm3 developers don't guarantee API stability, all of the steps below will assume the API as of that hash tag. If you decide to use a newer version of libopencm3, you may have to update the example code I give you to conform to the new API. With that out of the way, let's get it:

$ sudo yum install git
$ cd $TOPDIR
$ git clone git://github.com/libopencm3/libopencm3.git
$ cd libopencm3
$ git checkout -b clalancette-tutorial \
a909b5ca9e18f802e3caef19e63d38861662c128

What we've done here is to clone the repository, then checkout a new branch with the head at hash a909b5ca9e18f802e3caef19e63d38861662c128. This ensures that even if the library moves forward in the future, we will always use that hash tag for the purposes of this tutorial. Next we build the library:

$ unset PREFIX
$ make DETECT_TOOLCHAIN=1
$ make DETECT_TOOLCHAIN=1 install
$ export PREFIX=~/opt/cross

Here we need to unset PREFIX because libopencm3 uses PREFIX for the toolchain name prefix (arm-none-eabi), not the path prefix. Once we've done that, we can tell libopencm3 to detect the toolchain, and then use it to build libopencm3. Finally we use the install target to install the headers and the static libraries (.a files) to our toolchain. Assuming this is successful, everything necessary should be in ~/opt/cross/arm-none-eabi/, with the libraries in lib/libopencm3* and the header files in include/libopencm3. Note that there is one .a file per chip that is supported by libopencm3; we'll return to this later when we start building code for our chip.