Hardware targets#

Pigweed is designed to be portable to many different hardware platforms. Pigweed’s GN build comes with an extensible target system that allows it to be configured to build for any number of platforms, which all build simultaneously.

Defining a target#

Each Pigweed target built by a project is defined within the GN build as a toolchain providing the target’s build parameters.

In Pigweed, these target toolchains are defined as GN scopes, which are fed into a generate_toolchain template to create the complete GN toolchain.

Hierarchical target structure#

The rationale for scope-based toolchains is to make Pigweed targets extensible. Variables from a toolchain can be forwarded into new scopes and then extended or overriden. This facilitates the sharing of common configuration options between toolchains, and allows for hierarchical structures. Upstream Pigweed makes use of this heavily; it defines basic compiler-only configurations, uses these as a base for board-specific toolchains, then creates its final targets on top of those.

graph TD arm_gcc --> arm_gcc_cortex_m4 arm_gcc --> arm_gcc_cortex_m4f arm_gcc_cortex_m4f --> arm_gcc_cortex_m4f_debug arm_gcc_cortex_m4f --> arm_gcc_cortex_m4f_size_optimized arm_gcc_cortex_m4f_debug --> stm32f429i_disc1_debug

Toolchain target variables#

The core of a toolchain is defining the tools it uses. This is done by setting the variables ar, cc, and cxx to the appropriate compilers. Pigweed provides many commonly used compiler configurations in the pw_toolchain module.

The rest of a Pigweed target’s configuration is listed within a defaults scope in its toolchain. Every variable in this scope is an override of a GN build argument defined in Pigweed. Some notable arguments include:

  • default_configs: A list of GN configs to apply to every pw_* GN template. This is typically used to set compiler flags, optimization levels, global #defines, etc.

  • default_public_deps: List of GN targets which are added as a dependency to all pw_* GN targets. This is used to add global module dependencies.

  • Facade backends: Pigweed defines facades to provide a common interface for core system features such as logging without assuming an implementation. When building a Pigweed target, the implementations for each of these must be chosen. The *_BACKEND build args that Pigweed defines are used to set these.

There are many other build arguments that can be set, some of which are module-specific. A full list can be seen by running gn args --list out, and further documentation can be found within their respective modules.

Example Pigweed target#

The code below demonstrates how a project might configure one of its Pigweed targets.

import("//build_overrides/pigweed.gni")

import("$dir_pw_toolchain/arm_gcc/toolchains.gni")
import("$dir_pw_toolchain/generate_toolchain.gni")

my_target_scope = {
  # Use Pigweed's Cortex M4 toolchain as a base.
  _toolchain_base = pw_toolchain_arm_gcc.cortex_m4f_debug

  # Forward everything except the defaults scope from that toolchain.
  forward_variables_from(_toolchain_base, "*", [ "defaults" ])

  defaults = {
    # Forward everything from the base toolchain's defaults.
    forward_variables_from(_toolchain_base.defaults, "*")

    # Extend with custom build arguments for the target.
    pw_log_BACKEND = dir_pw_log_tokenized
  }
}

# Create the actual GN toolchain from the scope.
generate_toolchain("my_target") {
  forward_variables_from(my_target_scope, "*")
}

Upstream targets#

The following is a list of targets used for upstream Pigweed development.

Work-in-progress targets#

You can see a list of hardware targets that are under development but not yet landed here.

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