[fpc-pascal] ARM Linux cross development

[Michael Schnell]

On 01/14/2014 09:37 PM, Michael Ring wrote:
> One day (In a far far away future) I will understand how this whole 
> compiler magic works ;-)
>
Same here. ;-)

About a year ago, a programmer in Austria and myself tried to get 
Lazarus based cross development for ARM based QNAP NAS boxes running. He 
even started to write a document on how to do this. (I promised to push 
same into the Lazarus Wiki in German and English, once we get it going.)

But we gave up for several reasons.

  - We only could get fpc, gdb, and gdbserver compiled after installing 
the complete "Code Source" C cross development suite (including 
Eclipse). We did not find any smaller and more handy package that did 
work for that purpose. We did not thinks that it is worth (or even 
legal) to recommend this in the Wiki.

  - We could not get the Lazarus remote debug feature decently working. 
In theory same can be activated in two different flavors:
1) Using gdbserver on the target: this supposedly is doable "out of the 
box", but here you can't manually stop a running program that not by 
itself reaches a breakpoint. Additionally, in fact you need to create a 
"cross-gdb" (running on PC, targeting ARM) which is independent of FPC 
but a real PITA to built.
2) Using gdb on the target and accessing same from Lazarus by SSH. Here, 
some code to do this is existing in the Lazarus svn, but it is commented 
out, supposedly because nobody got it decently running yet.

As we shared the opinion that cross-compiling without decent remote 
debugging does not make any sense on headless target devices, we gave up.

-Michael
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