Goal

I am trying to write a simple device driver on Ubuntu. I want to do this using Eclipse (or a better IDE that is suitable for driver programming). Here is the code:

#include <linux/module.h>

static int __init hello_world( void )
{
  printk( "hello world!\n" );
  return 0;
}

static void __exit goodbye_world( void )
{
  printk( "goodbye world!\n" );
}

module_init( hello_world );
module_exit( goodbye_world );

My effort

After some research, I decided to use Eclipse CTD for developing the driver (while I am still not sure if it supports multi-threading debugging tools). So I:

1. Installed Ubuntu 11.04 desktop x86 on a VMWare virtual machine,
2. Installed eclipse-cdt and linux-headers-2.6.38-8 using Synaptic Package Manager,
3. Created a C Project named TestDriver1 and copy-pasted above code to it,
4. Changed the default build command, make, to the following customized build command:

make -C /lib/modules/2.6.38-8-generic/build M=/home/isaac/workspace/TestDriver1

The problem

I get an error when I try to build this project using eclipse. Here is the log for the build:

**** Build of configuration Debug for project TestDriver1 ****

make -C /lib/modules/2.6.38-8-generic/build M=/home/isaac/workspace/TestDriver1 all

make: Entering directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.38-8-generic'

make: *** No rule to make target vmlinux', needed byall'. Stop.

make: Leaving directory '/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.38-8-generic'

Interestingly, I get no error when I use shell instead of eclipse to build this project. To use shell, I just create a Makefile containing obj-m += TestDriver1.o and use the above make command to build.

So, something must be wrong with the eclipse Makefile. Maybe it is looking for the vmlinux architecture (?) or something while current architecture is x86. Maybe it's because of VMWare?

As I understood, eclipse creates the makefiles automatically and modifying it manually would cause errors in the future OR make managing makefile difficult.

So, how can I compile this project on eclipse?