Setting up a container based ARM-cortex development environment

In the past we’d looked at Distrobox as a means to setup ephemeral environments. Here we take a more traditional and a lighter path, direct on the container engine.

For this we’ll be using Podman. It’s an alternative to the ever popular Docker, but I find Podman integrates better with the rest of Linux. Of course you may prefer Docker, in that case just substitute the commands, they’d be identical.

Now, this is not a primer on containers, so we’ll breeze past the setup, but feel free to look up the concepts if you’re inclined. First install Podman on your system. For Debian this’d be:

   sudo apt install podman

We’ll take the baseline minimal Alpine Linux image, and build a custom local image, adding the required toolchain. For this we need a Dockerfile.

   FROM docker.io/library/alpine

   # Python
   RUN apk add --no-cache python3 python3-dev

   # GNU Arm embedded toolchain
   #   gcc-arm-none-eabi      -> arm-none-eabi-gcc, arm-none-eabi-ar, libgcc
   #   binutils-arm-none-eabi -> pulled in as a dependency: arm-none-eabi-objcopy/-ld
   #   newlib-arm-none-eabi   -> bare-metal C library + headers (stdint.h, string.h)
   #   make                   -> 
   RUN apk add --no-cache \
           make \
           gcc-arm-none-eabi \
           newlib-arm-none-eabi \
           gdb-multiarch

   RUN apk add --no-cache py3-pyocd
   #<add PyOCD target support>

   WORKDIR /project

Create a new directory in your preferred location, call it dev-env. In that directory create a file name Dockerfile with the above content.

Now run:

   podman build -t arm-toolchain .

This will build a local image named arm-toolchain with the toolchain as we required. Now we can invoke the following command in our workspace directory to drop into the container with the tools available to us.

   podman run -it --rm -v "$PWD:/project" arm-toolchain

Then you can run make --version and arm-none-eabi-gcc --version to confirm they work. When you are finished with a development session simply run exit or press CTRL-D. You will need to run the command whenever you start development.

Make sure to set the appropriate usb rules so that the probe is accessible within the container!