OpenEmbedded Tools for Eclipse

Alex and I have been working on some plugins to let us use our favorite IDE with our favorite embedded Linux distro builder. We now have some basic functionality in place that will allow minimal support of OpenEmbedded within Eclipse. The functionality can be summarized into three areas:

1. Using OpenEmbedded and Poky Linux toolchains from within an Eclipse C project.

2. Running a cross-compiled binary in a Poky-built QEMU environment.

3. Viewing, Editing, and creating BitBake recipes.

What I've been working on mainly is the 3rd item. It would seem simple to just edit BitBake files in Eclipse, but it's turned out that writing a custom filesystem (the Eclipse form) was necessary to allow OE/Poky projects even to be viewable. This is due to the large number of files that is generated in the temp directories, and when Eclipse first creates a project in an existing OE install, the resulting brute-force filescan is not pretty. To overcome this I implemented a custom filesystem that simply ignores some key directories, namely the TMPDIR and DL_DIR, which aren't used to store recipes anyway. With that out of the way I was able to use Eclipse's build in file and basic project management facilities without problems. The next step was a custom editor for the BitBake recipe syntax. I have a basic editor with syntax highlighting and some code templates complete. Here is a screenshot ~

created on: 11/03/08

What's up next is console integration (you can see the beginings of that in the screenshot) such that a recipe, via drag-and-drop, can be build from a console. Once that's complete I hope to tie back into CDT with a "checkout recipe into workspace" feature that uses bitbake to automagically build a source project for any OE recipe. This would simplify the steps necessary to configure a CDT project to properly work with an install of OE or Poky.

Interested? Current builds are available here: http://bugcommunity.com/downloads/files/ote/updatesite