Building a cFS executable for VxWorks 7.0 on ARM v8

[asvatos1]

Hi,

I am working in Ubuntu 20.04 where I am cross-compiling a cFS executable to run on VxWorks 7.0 running on an ARM v8 (Cortex-A72 processor) and I would like to know if there is a working example available somewhere for how to build cFS to run on VxWorks.

From reviewing another post, I have gathered that the steps to build cFS to run on VxWorks are:

1. Modify targets.cmake to include the line 'SET(cpu1_SYSTEM arm-vxworks7.0)' to force the build system to search for that toolchain file.
2. Create the requisite toolchain file with the name 'arm-vxworks7.0'.
3. No need to modify OSAL BSP for generic-vxworks as it generic enough to be used on multiple platforms.
4. Possibly modify the PSP since it is for Power PC.
5. Call 'make prep arm-vxworks7.0' from console in the cFS directory.

To accomplish (2), I examined the toolchain-ppc-vxworks6.9.cmake toolchain file and I am modifying it by hand be suitable for my case.

Is this the correct approach?

Thank you for reviewing this post.

-Adam

[asvatos1]

My assumption about there being no need to modify the OSAL or the OSAL board support package was incorrect. From the VxWorks site:

VLegacy BSPs (VxWorks 6.9.x.x and older) are not compatible with VxWorks 7 due to the following fundamental differences:
	VxWorks 7 uses a new VxBus driver infrastructure that, among other improvements, is configured based on device probing rather than hard coding of device information.
	VxWorks 7 BSPs use a completely different directory structure.
	VxWorks 7 BSPs provide separation between processor family-specific components and board-specific components.

While building the cFS executable according to my requirements, I found that many of the VxWorks definitions such as SEM_ID, VX_BINARY_SEMAPHORE couldn't be found. This is because the names of these definitions have changed from VxWorks 6.9 to 7.0. To solve that one would need to re-write OSAL to correctly interface with VxWorks 7.0.

[skliper]

There was some work done in the "Caelum" development cycle to get us closer to supporting VxWorks 7 (nasa/osal#610 for example), and I've heard of some prototyping based on the SDK. VxWorks 7 support out of the box is definitely on the roadmap, and we are actively soliciting contributions and pursuing collaboration opportunities to get this done. Eventually we'd like to get a VxWorks 7 SDK workflow into our CI. I realize this isn't immediate help, but perhaps there's enough interest across the community that we can add to the current momentum around this topic!

[pmehradnia]

@skliper Thanks for the update and the quick reply! 👍

[edison369]

Hi @skliper! Do you know if it is already posible to build a cFS executable using the VxWorks SDK? If not, I must have the licensed VxWorks installation to do it, right?

[skliper]

@edison369 I've heard someone here has built and run cFS using the VxWorks SDK here, but I haven't gotten more details than that. I'll reach out and see if I can find out more details.

[astrogeco]

Hi from the other side! @ezpollack and @acudmore looked into this a while ago and made some progress using the ROS2 VxWorks repo https://github.com/Wind-River/vxworks7-ros2-build as a starting point. I vaguely remember that the "free" SDK was missing some features needed to for OSAL but that's as far as my memory goes. Good luck!

[edison369]

@skliper and @astrogeco thank you both for the quick reply and your help! I'll try then 😃