Family: native

• Known Issues
• Toolchains
• Dependencies
• Profiling

There's currently only one cpu/board in this family: Board: native

The RIOT native port uses system calls and signals to emulate hardware at the API level. That means that you can compile the complete RIOT software stack for your *NIX system and run it as a process. Reasons why you might want to do that are:

• You want to try out RIOT but don't have one of the supported hardware platforms
• You are developing an application or driver for RIOT and want to test and debug it without the limitations and requirements of debugging on actual hardware
• You want to experiment with network protocols in a controlled environment

There is support for networking through tap interfaces. Implementations for some typical device drivers exist.

Known Issues

Check the list of open issues labeled native in the github issue tracker

Toolchains

Working:

• gnu libc 2.13
• gcc 4.4.6

Host Systems

As a rule of thumb: native is developed primarily on Arch Linux, so this should always be the most reliable platform.

Working:

• Arch Linux
• Debian 7 Wheezy (Stable)
• Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangloin (LTS)
• Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander
• OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion
• OS X 10.9 Mavericks

Not Working:

• Windows - no plans for support exist
• FreeBSD - currently has some bugs but is supported in principal

Dependencies

Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander

Valgrind troubleshooting

You may encounter the following error message, even though libc6-dbg is installed:

==11361== Memcheck, a memory error detector
==11361== Copyright (C) 2002-2012, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==11361== Using Valgrind-3.8.1 and LibVEX; rerun with -h for copyright info
==11361== Command: ./bin/native/aodvv2_node.elf tap0
==11361== 

valgrind:  Fatal error at startup: a function redirection
valgrind:  which is mandatory for this platform-tool combination
valgrind:  cannot be set up.  Details of the redirection are:
valgrind:  
valgrind:  A must-be-redirected function
valgrind:  whose name matches the pattern:      strlen
valgrind:  in an object with soname matching:   ld-linux.so.2
valgrind:  was not found whilst processing
valgrind:  symbols from the object with soname: ld-linux.so.2
valgrind:  
valgrind:  Possible fixes: (1, short term): install glibc's debuginfo
valgrind:  package on this machine.  (2, longer term): ask the packagers
valgrind:  for your Linux distribution to please in future ship a non-
valgrind:  stripped ld.so (or whatever the dynamic linker .so is called)
valgrind:  that exports the above-named function using the standard
valgrind:  calling conventions for this platform.  The package you need
valgrind:  to install for fix (1) is called
valgrind:  
valgrind:    On Debian, Ubuntu:                 libc6-dbg
valgrind:    On SuSE, openSuSE, Fedora, RHEL:   glibc-debuginfo
valgrind:  
valgrind:  Cannot continue -- exiting now.  Sorry.

To enable the use of Valgrind, change the lines in /etc/apt/sources.list from something like

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main

to

deb [arch=i386,amd64] http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu saucy main

and execute

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libc6-dbg:i386

Profiling

Valgrind/cachegrind

You can use the Valgrind tool cachegrind to profile native processes.

Usage:

make -B clean all-valgrind
valgrind --tool=cachegrind ./bin/native/default.elf tap0
cg_annotate cachegrind.out.18541

The cachegrind file name contains the process ID as a suffix, so you can create profiles for several instances at the same time. You can also use the kcachegrind GUI to investigate the cachegrind files.

Valgrind/callgrind

Profiling with callgrind is not working at the moment.

gprof

Profiling with gprof will be supported when https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT/pull/789 is merged.