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Hackaday Superconference 2019 Badge Toolchain Docker Image

Why?

Installing these tools in a Docker image means you don't have to install them on your local machine, which is probably weird because of all the other toolchains you've indiscriminately installed before. Stop the madness and keep things organized into useful containers. And compared to a virtual machine, you can edit your source files and do version control on your local machine, no need to worry about transferring files to a VM or sharing folders.

  • Pros: Likely to work on any computer that runs Docker, no conflicts with existing setup. On macOS Catalina, this removes a major source of pain approving all the toolchain binaries before running.
  • Cons: Not as easy to reach in and tweak the toolchain itself; if you need to do that, consider moving up to a full virtual machine. Also, if you're attempting to flash the bootloader, soc, ipl, or anything else that uses dfu-util, it's unlikely to work except on a Linux host system due to limitations on Mac and Windows passthrough of USB devices. This may require installing a local version of dfu-util.

Building the image

While in this directory (hadbadge2019_fpgasoc) run the following command to create a "hadbadge" image with minimal Debian + ECP5 toolchain: ./build_hadbadge_docker_image.sh

Launching a container

The badge codebase requires access to parent and peer directories when compiling various subprojects, so the docker command is a little tricky. It maps the PWD's parent and then shifts the working directory to the PWD. That means the container needs to be launched from within one of the application directories. Not too bad, since this is where you would run make anyway.

The tricky parts are wrapped in badge_container.sh which is a script to extract the top level and current PWD. The script requires git in order to determine the top-level directory of the repository we're in.

The docker run command line uses privileged mode, which should give it access to USB devices for flashing (not tested due to lack of access to hardware at the moment, and likely to work only on Linux or when running inside a Linux VM with specific USB devices granted to the VM). It will launch the hadbadge image plus whatever commands you want to run inside the container. The command line above is made available in the parent directory for convenience, so the typical use case looks like this:

  • Start in the hadbadge2019_fpgasoc directory
  • cd app-helloworld
  • ../badge_container.sh make This will launch a container, compile the source in the current directory, store output in the current directory, exit the container, and remove the container.