inav/docs/development/Building in Windows 10 or 11 with Linux Subsystem.md

Building in Windows 10/11 with Linux subsystem (WSL) [Recommended]

Linux subsystem for Windows (WSL) 10/11 is probably the simplest way of building INAV under Windows.

Setting up the environment

Enable WSL: run windows features enable windows subsytem for linux reboot

Install Ubuntu:

1. Go to Microsoft store https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/b/home
2. Search and install most recent Ubuntu LTS version
3. When download completed, select Launch Ubuntu
4. When prompted enter a user name and password which you will need to remember
5. When complete, the linux command prompt will be displayed

NOTE: from this point all commands are entered into the Ubunto shell command window

Update the repo packages:

• sudo apt update

Install Git, Make, gcc and Ruby

• sudo apt-get install git make cmake ruby

Install python and python-yaml to allow updates to settings.md

• sudo apt-get install python3

CMAKE and Ubuntu 18_04

To run cmake in the latest version you will need to update from Ubuntu 18_04 to 20_04. The fastest way to do it is to uninstall current version and install 20_04 for Microsoft Store https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9N6SVWS3RX71

Downloading the INAV repository (example):

Mount MS windows C drive and clone INAV

1. cd /mnt/c
2. git clone https://github.com/iNavFlight/inav.git
3. git checkout 6.1.1 (to switch to a specific release tag, for this example INAV version 6.1.1)
4. git checkout -b my-branch (to create own branch)

You are ready! You now have a folder called inav in the root of C drive that you can edit in windows

If you get a cloning error

On some installations, you may see the following error:

Cloning into 'inav'...
error: chmod on /mnt/c/inav/.git/config.lock failed: Operation not permitted
fatal: could not set 'core.filemode' to 'false'

You can fix this with by remounting the drive using the following commands

1. sudo umount /mnt/c
2. sudo mount -t drvfs C: /mnt/c -o metadata

Building with Make (example):

For detailed build instructions see Building in Linux

Launch Ubuntu: Click Windows Start button then scroll and launch "Ubuntu"

Building from Ubuntu command line

cd /mnt/c/inav

Do it onece to prepare build environment

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..

Then to build

cd build
make MATEKF722

Building with Ninja (example):

Ninja is a popular cross-platform tool. It is both lightweight and executes parallel builds by default. It is advantageous to use this over the old make method. There are detailed instructions for building with Ninja in Building in Linux.

Launch Ubuntu: Click Windows Start button. Then scroll and launch Ubuntu.

Tip

Before using Ninja, you will need to install it. From the Ubuntu command prompt type sudo apt-get install ninja-build -y and press enter.

Building from the command line:

First, change to the INAV directory with cd /mnt/c/inav

Before building, you will need to prepare the build environment. You only need to do this once, unless you reinstall WSL or cmake.

mkdir build
cd build
cmake -GNinja ..

From then on, you can build your target by calling the following from inside the build directory.

ninja MATEKF722

If you want to build multiple targets. You can use:

ninja MATEKF722 MATEKF405SE SPEEDYBEEF405

Updating the documents

cd /mnt/c/inav
python3 src/utils/update_cli_docs.py

Flashing:

Launch windows configurator GUI and from within the firmware flasher select Load firmware[Local] Hex files can be found in the folder c:\inav\build

Troubleshooting

Syntax error: "(" unexpected

dzikuvx@BerlinAtHome:/mnt/c/Users/pspyc/Documents/Projects/inav/build$ make MATEKF722SE
Generating MATEKF722SE/settings_generated.h, MATEKF722SE/settings_generated.c
/bin/sh: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
make[3]: *** [src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/CMakeFiles/MATEKF722SE.elf.dir/build.make:63: src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/MATEKF722SE/settings_generated.h] Error 2
make[2]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:33607: src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/CMakeFiles/MATEKF722SE.elf.dir/all] Error 2
make[1]: *** [CMakeFiles/Makefile2:33290: src/main/target/MATEKF722SE/CMakeFiles/MATEKF722SE.dir/rule] Error 2
make: *** [Makefile:13703: MATEKF722SE] Error 2

This error can be triggered by a Windows PATHs included in the Linux Subsystem. The solution is:

For WSL V1 - Flags set as 7 by default

1. Open Windows RegEdit tool
2. Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{GUID}\Flags
3. Change Flags from 7 to 5
4. Restart WSL and Windows preferably
5. cd build
6. cmake ..
7. make {TARGET} should be working again

For WSL V2 - Flags set as 0x0000000f (15) by default

1. Open Windows RegEdit tool
2. Find HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{GUID}\Flags
3. Change Flags from f to d, it is stored as Base Hexadecimal
4. Restart WSL and Windows preferably
5. cd build
6. cmake ..
7. make {TARGET} should be working again

Or, for either version

1. In the Linux Subsystem, cd /etc/
2. Create a new file with sudo nano wsl.conf
3. Enter the following in to the new file:

[Interop]
appendWindowsPath=false

4. Save the file by holding Ctrl and pressing o
5. Press Enter to confirm the wsl.conf filename.
6. Hit Ctrl+x to exit nano
7. Restart WSL and Windows preferably
8. cd build
9. cmake ..
10. make {TARGET} should be working again

Building targets is very slow

I was pretty shocked when my new i7 -10750 laptop took 25 minutes to build a single target. My old i3-4030 could do the same job in about 2.5 minutes. If you're also suffering from slow builds. Open an elevated PowerShell window and type

wsl -l -v

If you see your Linux distribution is using WSL 2, this is the problem. WSL 2 is quicker than WSL 1 for a lot of things. However, if your files are on a windows mounted drive in Linux, it is extremely slow. There are two options:

1. Put your files on the Linux file system
2. Change to WSL 1

Using the Linux file system (recommended)

To use the Linux file system, make sure the distro is running. Open File Explorer and navigate to \\wsl$. In that path you will find your distros listed. At this point, map a network drive to your distro. Inside the distro, you can find your home directory at /home/~username~/. Create your GitHub folders here.

If after this you have problems with writing to the directories from within VSCode. Open the application for your distro and type

sudo chown -R ~username~ GitHub

~Username~ is your root distro user that you created and GitHub should be the root folder for your GitHub repositories.

To switch back to WSL 1

To do this, in the elevated PowerShell window, you can see the name of your distro. Mine is Ubuntu-20.04, so I'll use that in this example. Simply type

wsl --set-version Ubuntu-20.04 1

and your distro will be converted to WSL 1. Once finished, reboot your system. Next time you compile a build, it will be faster.