Книга: Embedded Linux Primer: A Practical, Real-World Approach

4.2.2. Compiling the Kernel

4.2.2. Compiling the Kernel

Understanding a large body of software such as Linux can be a daunting task. It is too large to simply "step through" the code to follow what is happening. Multithreading and preemption add to the complexity of analysis. In fact, even locating the entry point (the first line of code to be executed upon entry to the kernel) can be challenging. One of the more useful ways to understand the structure of a large binary image is to examine its built components.

The output of the kernel build system produces several common files, as well as one or more architecture-specific binary modules. Common files are always built regardless of the architecture. Two of the common files are System.map and vmlinux, introduced earlier. The former is useful during kernel debug and is particularly interesting. It contains a human-readable list of the kernel symbols and their respective addresses. The latter is an architecture-specific ELF[27] file in executable format. It is produced by the top-level kernel makefile for every architecture. If the kernel was compiled with symbolic debug information, it will be contained in the vmlinux image. In practice, although it is an ELF executable, this file is usually never booted directly, as you will see shortly.

Listing 4-2 is a snippet of output resulting from executing make in a recent kernel tree configured for the ARM XScale architecture. The kernel source tree was configured for the ADI Engineering Coyote reference board based on the Intel IXP425 network processor using the following command:

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=xscale_be- ixp4xx_defconfig

This command does not build the kernel; it prepares the kernel source tree for the XScale architecture including an initial default configuration for this architecture and processor. It builds a default configuration (the dot-config file) that drives the kernel build, based on the defaults found in the ixp4xx_defconfig file. We have more to say about the configuration process later, in Section 4.3, "Kernel Build System."

Listing 4-2 shows the command that builds the kernel. Only the first few and last few lines of the build output are shown for this discussion.

Listing 4-2. Kernel Build Output

$ make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=xscale_be- zImage
      CHK      include/linux/version.h
      HOSTCC   scripts/basic/fixdep
      .
      . <hundreds of lines of output omitted here>
      .
      LD       vmlinux
      SYSMAP   System.map
      SYSMAP   .tmp_System.map
      OBJCOPY  arch/arm/boot/Image
      Kernel:  arch/arm/boot/Image is ready
      AS       arch/arm/boot/compressed/head.o
      GZIP     arch/arm/boot/compressed/piggy.gz
      AS       arch/arm/boot/compressed/piggy.o
      CC       arch/arm/boot/compressed/misc.o
      AS       arch/arm/boot/compressed/head-xscale.o
      AS       arch/arm/boot/compressed/big-endian.o
      LD       arch/arm/boot/compressed/vmlinux
      OBJCOPY  arch/arm/boot/zImage
      Kernel:  arch/arm/boot/zImage is ready
      Building modules, stage 2.
      ...

To begin, notice the invocation of the build. Both the desired architecture (ARCH=arm) and the toolchain (CROSS_COMPILE=xscale_be-) were specified on the command line. This forces make to use the XScale toolchain to build the kernel image and to use the arm-specific branch of the kernel source tree for architecture-dependent portions of the build. We also specify a target called zImage. This target is common to many architectures and is described in Chapter 5, "Kernel Initialization."

The next thing you might notice is that the actual commands used for each step have been hidden and replaced with a shorthand notation. The motivation behind this was to clean up the build output to draw more attention to intermediate build issues, particularly compiler warnings. In earlier kernel source trees, each compilation or link command was output to the console verbosely, which often required several lines for each step. The end result was virtually unreadable, and compiler warnings slipped by unnoticed in the noise. The new system is definitely an improvement because any anomaly in the build process is easily spotted. If you want or need to see the complete build step, you can force verbose output by defining V=1 on the make command line.

We have omitted most of the actual compilation and link steps in Listing 4-2, for clarity. (This particular build has more than 900 individual compile and link commands in the build. That would have made for a long listing, indeed.) After all the intermediate files and library archives have been built and compiled, they are put together in one large ELF build target called vmlinux. Although it is architecture specific, this vmlinux target is a common targetit is produced for all supported Linux architectures.

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