Installing

The first step to get started with NuttX is to install a series of required tools, a toolchain for the architecture you will be working with and, finally, download NuttX source code itself.

Prerequisites

First, install the following set of system dependencies according to your Operating System:

 sudo apt install \
 bison flex gettext texinfo libncurses5-dev libncursesw5-dev xxd \
 git gperf automake libtool pkg-config build-essential gperf genromfs \
 libgmp-dev libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libisl-dev binutils-dev libelf-dev \
 libexpat1-dev gcc-multilib g++-multilib picocom u-boot-tools util-linux

 sudo dnf install \
 bison flex gettext texinfo ncurses-devel ncurses ncurses-compat-libs \
 git gperf automake libtool pkgconfig @development-tools gperf genromfs \
 gmp-devel mpfr-devel libmpc-devel isl-devel binutils-devel elfutils-libelf-devel \
 expat-devel gcc-c++ g++ picocom uboot-tools util-linux

 brew tap discoteq/discoteq
 brew install flock
 brew install x86_64-elf-gcc  # Used by simulator
 brew install u-boot-tools  # Some platform integrate with u-boot

that installation guide for Linux. This has been verified against the Ubuntu 18.04 version.

There may be complications interacting with programming tools over USB. Recently support for USBIP was added to WSL 2 which has been used with the STM32 platform, but it is not trivial to configure: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb

installation in addition to these packages:

make              bison             libmpc-devel
gcc-core          byacc             automake-1.15
gcc-g++           gperf             libncurses-devel
flex              gdb               libmpfr-devel
git               unzip             zlib-devel

KConfig frontend

NuttX configuration system uses KConfig which is exposed via a series of interactive menu-based frontends, part of the kconfig-frontends package. Depending on your OS you may use a precompiled package or you will have to build it from source, which is available in the NuttX tools repository:

\ cd tools/kconfig-frontends \ ./configure --enable-mconf --disable-nconf --disable-gconf --disable-qconf \ make \ make install

\ cd tools/kconfig-frontends \ ./configure --enable-mconf --disable-nconf --disable-gconf --disable-qconf \ aclocal
automake \ make \ sudo make install

\ cd tools/kconfig-frontends \ patch < ../kconfig-macos.diff -p 1 \ ./configure --enable-mconf --disable-shared --enable-static --disable-gconf --disable-qconf --disable-nconf \ make \ sudo make install

NuttX also supports kconfiglib by default, which is a Kconfig tool implemented in Python 2/3. Compared with kconfig-frontends, kconfiglib provides NuttX with the possibility of multi-platform support(configure NuttX in Windows native/Visual Studio), and also kconfiglib has a stronger Kconfig syntax check, this will help developers to avoid some Kconfig syntax errors. Install kconfiglib via following command:

sudo apt install python3-kconfiglib

If you are a working on Windows, which also need the support of windows-curses:

pip install windows-curses

Toolchain

To build Apache NuttX you need the appropriate toolchain according to your target platform. Some Operating Systems such as Linux distribute toolchains for various architectures. This is usually an easy choice however you should be aware that in some cases the version offered by your OS may have problems and it may be better to use a widely used build from another source.

The following example shows how to install a toolchain for ARM architecture:

 brew install --cask gcc-arm-embedded

For 64 bit ARM targets, such as Allwinner A64:

 brew install --cask gcc-aarch64-embedded

 usermod -a -G users USER
 # get a login shell that knows we're in this group:
 su - USER
 sudo mkdir /opt/gcc
 sudo chgrp -R users /opt/gcc
 sudo chmod -R u+rw /opt/gcc
 cd /opt/gcc

Download and extract toolchain:

 HOST_PLATFORM=x86_64-linux   # use 'aarch64-linux' for ARM64 Linux, or 'mac' for Intel macOS
 # For Windows there is a zip instead (gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-win32.zip)
 curl -L -O https://armkeil.blob.core.windows.net/developer/Files/downloads/gnu-rm/10.3-2021.10/gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-{HOST_PLATFORM}.tar.bz2
 tar xf gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10-{HOST_PLATFORM}.tar.bz2

Add the toolchain to your `PATH`:

 echo "export PATH=/opt/gcc/gcc-arm-none-eabi-10.3-2021.10/bin:PATH" >> ~/.bashrc

You can edit your shell's rc files if you don't use bash.

Tip

There are hints on how to get the latest tool chains for most supported architectures in the Apache NuttX CI helper script and Docker container

Required toolchain should be part of each arch documentation (see relevant issue).

Download NuttX

Apache NuttX is actively developed on GitHub. There are two main repositories, nuttx and apps, where the latter is technically optional (but recommended for complete set of features). If you intend to contribute changes, you need the absolute latest version or you simply prefer to work using git, you should clone these repositories (recommended). Otherwise you can choose to download any stable release archive.

\ mkdir nuttxspace \ cd nuttxspace \ git clone https://github.com/apache/nuttx.git nuttx \ git clone https://github.com/apache/nuttx-apps apps

The development source code is also available as a compressed archive, should you need it:

\ mkdir nuttxspace \ cd nuttxspace \ curl -L https://github.com/apache/nuttx/tarball/master -o nuttx.tar.gz
curl -L https://github.com/apache/nuttx-apps/tarball/master -o apps.tar.gz \ tar zxf nuttx.tar.gz --one-top-level=nuttx --strip-components 1 \ tar zxf apps.tar.gz --one-top-level=apps --strip-components 1

There are also .zip archives available (useful for Windows users): just replace tarball with zipball.

example uses version 12.2.1:

\ mkdir nuttxspace \ cd nuttxspace \ curl -L https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/nuttx/12.2.1/apache-nuttx-12.2.1.tar.gz?action=download -o nuttx.tar.gz \ curl -L https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.lua/nuttx/12.2.1/apache-nuttx-apps-12.2.1.tar.gz?action=download -o apps.tar.gz \ tar zxf nuttx.tar.gz \ tar zxf apps.tar.gz