I am new to Linux but have many years of Windows development experience. I need to produce something for the Beaglebone Black and of course it needs to be done yesterday. Hence I am evaluating VisualGDB to see if it can get me up and running quickly.

I am using:

Beaglebone Black flashed with BBB-eMMC-flasher-2013.09.04.img
VisualGDB-4.3r2-trial.msi
Vis Std 2013 Professional Update 4
Windows 8.1 Enterprise

I have followed the two tutorials for C++ development. The first (remote build) works as expected. Although it does ask if I want to correct mismatching environment for PS1 between console “u@h;w.$” and command mode “u@h:w$”, which I select “FixValue”.

I have had problems with the second tutorial, which is my preferred approach, that of cross-compilling on the Windows box.
The first problem is that the Toolchain Test Fails with

"no such file or directory" "Expected return code 108. Actual return code 127".

If I ignore this I can go on to build the sample app which works but debugging the app fails with

"The gdbserver has exited with code 1" 

and the GDBServer log displays

"Cannot exec /tmp/BBDemo2: No such file or directory.

Child exited with status 127
No program to debug.  GDBserver exiting."

But the file is there according to “file ./hello”. Running “readelf -l ./hello” shows that it is “requesting program interpreter /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3” which I can’t find.

If I deploy directly and run on the BBB again I get “Permission denied”. I tried “/lib/ld-linux.so.3 ./hello” which worked. So I set up a link

"ln -s -v /lib/ld-linux.so.3 /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3"

and running directly on the device now works.

But when running from the debugger I get a segmentation fault and this appears to occur in the loader (/lib/ld-linux.so.3) as Vis Std is trying to load its symbols.

I tried synchronising the sysroot but this led to build errors and IntelliSense errors. Note that the local sysroot directory was set to “c:sysgccbeaglebonearm-linux-gnueabihfsysroot”.

46 errors in total:-

"'__syscall_slong_t' does not name a type" in beaglebonearm-linux-gnueabihfsysrootusrincludetime.h (line 123)
expected initializer before '__THROWNL' in beaglebonearm-linux-gnueabihfsysrootusrincludepthread.h (line 123)
etc...

It would seem that I have some problem with the toolchain and/or syncing it between the BBB and the Windows box.

Could someone advise how to progress with this given that I’m not a linux person.

Thanks