Developers

This page contains documentation and resources for aspiring sigrok developers.

Source code browser

• gitweb

Tutorials and API descriptions

• libsigrok API
• libsigrokdecode API
• Protocol decoder HOWTO
• Protocol decoder API
• Formats and structures
• Hardware driver API
• Portability

Development guidelines

Please check the respective sub-project's HACKING file for coding guidelines and development tips.

• libsigrok
• libsigrokdecode
• sigrok-cli
• PulseView
• sigrok-firmware-fx2lafw

Design pages

This is a list of pages we use while working through new features or designs. They are working documents, not official API or feature documentation.

• New trigger specification
• High precision analog
• Probe Groups‎
• Improved Configuration Enumeration
• Input/output API revamp
• File format:sigrok/v3
• Domain-specific measurements and analysis
• Feeding hardware-decoded packets into libsigrok
• Sending data sequences to devices

Debugging

If you would like to see the output of the sr_dbg() or sr_err() functions you can use one of the following sigrok-cli options:

$ export SIGROK_DEBUG=1

or

$ sigrok-cli -l 5 <options> 

The 5 above is the log level. The following levels are available:

• 0: no output at all
• 1: error messages
• 2: warnings (the default)
• 3: informational messages
• 4: debug
• 5: spew

Valgrind

The following instructions outline how you can use valgrind to help find memory-related bugs in the sigrok libraries and frontends.

Debug packages setup (optional):

In order to get more useful output from valgrind you can (optionally) install various -dbg packages (if your distro provides them).

Example for libsigrok / libsigrokdecode / sigrok-cli on Debian:

$ apt-get install libgcc1-dbg libpcre3-dbg libglib2.0-0-dbg libftdi1-dbg zlib1g-dbg libasound2-dbg python3-dbg valgrind-dbg

For Qt and/or Boost based frontends (e.g. PulseView) additional packages might be helpful in some cases:

$ apt-get install libboost1.50-dbg libqt4-dbg libstdc++6-4.7-dbg libaudiofile-dbg \
  libsm6-dbg libice6-dbg libxt6-dbg libicu48-dbg libjpeg62-dbg

Building:

Here's a short overview of how to build the sigrok subprojects for use with valgrind. Basically everything should be built with -g O0 (enable debug output, and disable compiler optimizations). In this example, everything is installed into a custom install directory ($HOME/sr) in order to have a clean and consistent environment.

$ cd libsigrok; CFLAGS="-g -O0" ./configure --prefix=$HOME/sr && make install
$ cd libsigrokdecode; CFLAGS="-g -O0" ./configure --prefix=$HOME/sr && make install
$ cd sigrok-cli; CFLAGS="-g -O0" PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/sr/lib/pkgconfig ./configure --prefix=$HOME/sr && make install
$ cd pulseview; CXXFLAGS="-g -O0" PKG_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/sr/lib/pkgconfig cmake . -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:string=$HOME/sr && make install

Usage:

You can now run valgrind with your preferred options against the tools/libs in $HOME/sr. Note that G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly should be used to get valgrind-friendly glib behaviour.

Different command-line options, attached hardware and so on, will test different code paths in the libs/tools (e.g. sigrok-cli), of course.

$ LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$HOME/sr/lib G_SLICE=always-malloc G_DEBUG=gc-friendly valgrind -v --tool=memcheck --leak-check=full \
  --num-callers=40 --track-origins=yes --leak-resolution=high --track-fds=yes --fullpath-after=. \
  --read-var-info=yes ~/sr/bin/sigrok-cli --help

Release process

See Release process.

Miscellaneous

• Current events
• Public relations
• News (obsoleted by the blog)
• sigrok-gtk (GTK+ based LA GUI, currently not actively maintained)
• sigrok-qt (Qt based LA GUI, currently not actively maintained)