DS-5 Community Edition and ARM 926EJ-S

Hi all,

I'm new to DS-5 and ARM development. I am trying to develop a Linux application to run on a Ka-Ro TX25 module. This module consists of a Freescale i.MX257 processor. This module comes with RedBoot and Linux 2.6.31 preinstalled. I would like to develop on my Windows 8 machine, but have also been working with Linux Mint running on VMware. You can assume that i'm a Linux newbie.

I have read in some of the ARM DS-5 documentation that it includes a compiler which supports my instruction set; namely ARM 926EJ-S. When I create a new project in DS-5 I have four toolchain options:

1) ARM Compiler 5

2) ARM Compiler 6

3) GCC 4.x [arm-linux-gnueabihf]

4) GCC for ARM Bare-metal

I'm not sure what the differences are between these tools chains. However, I do know that I need to be using the following compiler; arm-linux-gnueabi-*; i.e. a tool chain which includes a soft-float compiler.

I've created a project using each toolchain to see which compiler is used. Option 3 appears to be the closest however it uses a hard float compiler. I assume I cannot use a gnueabihf compiler. I've see a couple of comments which indicate that the Linaro Toolchain only offers a hard float compiler. I also could find a gnueabi compiler in the DS-5 directory. I couldn't find any examples and I also haven't found any community discussion around DS-5 and ARM 926EJ-S.

There was also comments about the Linaro Toolchain including limited soft-float support; i.e. to support RedBoot. It recommended using the compilation options "-marm -march=armv4t -mfloat-abi=soft". I did try this out (although I had my doubts) with toolchain 3. When I ran the application on target I got a segmentation fault.

So, my question is can I use DS-5 for my application? And if so, which tool chain do I need to use.

My next question be be, once I have built my application, will be around debugging. My target does not include a SSH daemon or an SFTP server. I have read that the Remote System Explorer requires these tools. Is it possible to deploy and debug my application without these tools? I've been deploying my applications using TFTP. Eventually I think I want to cross compile OpenSSH and Dropbear for my target, but I was wondering if there is another approach I can use to demonstrate debugging before I spend time learning how to cross compile and deploy these tools.

As a side note: When I build a project using option 4, the build fails because "'arm-none-eabi-g++' is not recognized as an internal or external command". I searched the DS-5 directory for this compiler and it wasn't there. Where is this compiler?

Thanks for your help!