Hi,

I'm pretty out of the loop when it comes to embedded or small form factor devices. There seems to be so many different embedded processors and multiple versions of ARM etc - hence this message. I'm very interested in the RaspberryPi project, and would like to build some projects based on it. Does FPC support ARMv6 or later CPU's? A quick search on the RaspberryPi website seems to suggest that to write applications for it, you need ARMv6 or later support.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs

The exact processor on the RaspberryPi board will be a ARM11 700Mhz CPU and the model I am looking at will have 256Mb RAM.

That should work OK. I'm using fpc + lazarus on a Tegra 2, which is ARMv7. Just make sure you have enough swap space, since I've got 512MB and that isn't sufficient to build lazarus.

The thing to worry about, however, is hardfloat. Most distros are gearing up for it, but fpc doesn't support it, yet.

Henry

Henry Vermaak wrote

That should work OK.  I'm using fpc + lazarus on a Tegra 2, which is ARMv7.  Just make sure you have enough swap space, since I've got 512MB and that isn't sufficient to build lazarus.

I mostly use MSEide these days for the better debugging support, and faster IDE experience. I don't know if MSEide will support ARM though. But then, I wasn't considering doing development on the ARM device, simply deploying applications (GUI, console services and CGI) to it.

Thanks for the info Henry.

2012/2/7 Henry Vermaak :

 Just make sure you have enough swap space, since I've got 512MB and that isn't sufficient to build lazarus.

If you use the following flags then ld will use considerably less memory during linking:
-k--no-keep-memory -k--reduce-memory-overheads

This makes a huge difference for me on my ancient 500MB Laptop when building Lazarus. Also disabling smart linkable and smart linking and creation of debug info will cut memory usage down by another ~100 MB

I know about these, but it was actually the assembler crashing out first, didn't even get to the linking stage(!).

Henry

Graeme, can you help port fpGui to DirectFB ? this would help embedded development a lot...

2012/2/7 Henry Vermaak :

Jorge Aldo G. de F. Junior wrote

Graeme, can you help port fpGui to DirectFB ? this would help embedded development a lot...

Supporting DirectFB has been on my todo list for a long time. I can think of many cases where I would find that useful too - especially for the cross-platform fpGUI Installer I am working on. I just need to make some time for it.

Do you know of anybody else that has started such work? If so, we could merge that code into the official repository and go from there.

i tried to do, but while understanding directfb was easy, understanding how fpgui draws was quite hard...

2012/2/8 Graeme Geldenhuys :

Jorge Aldo G. de F. Junior wrote

Graeme, can you help port fpGui to DirectFB ? this would help embedded development a lot...

I don't know if you use fpgui only or the lcl too, but you might want to know that now the LCL can be ported to platform like directfb via LCL-CustomDrawn:

See http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Custom_Drawn_Interface

It was specially designed to run in a system such a the framebuffer, which is very similar to what Android for example offers: Only a raw surface.

Jorge Aldo G. de F. Junior wrote

i tried to do, but while understanding directfb was easy, understanding how fpgui draws was quite hard...

I thought fpGUI code was the easy part because only a handful of graphic primitives need to be implemented for each backend - to get the basics to work. If you saved any of your directfb work, could you pass it on to me. It should probably save me a lot of time bring DirectFB+fpGUI to life.

No need,

this guy ported the whole DirectFB stuff to freepascal :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/wiseslap/files/external/directfb/

DirectFB tutorial :

http://directfb.org/docs/DirectFB_Tutorials/simple.html

directfb stuff is quite simple, they have made the interface somewhat like an OOP layer (sort of), but using C language only... it can be used almost 1:1 in pascal...

2012/2/8 Graeme Geldenhuys :

Jorge Aldo G. de F. Junior wrote

No need, this guy ported the whole DirectFB stuff to freepascal :

Thanks, I'll take a look.