There are currently three active build systems within the PolarSSL releases:

• Make
• CMake
• Microsoft Visual Studio (Visual Studio 6 and Visual Studio 2010)

The main system used for development is CMake. That system is always the most up-to-date. The others should reflect all changes present in the CMake build system, but some features are not ported there by default.

We intentionally only use the absolute minimum of Make functionality, as we have discovered that a lot of Make features are not supported on all different implementations of Make on different platforms. As such, the Makefiles sometimes require some handwork or export statements in order to work for your platform.

In order to build the source using Make, just enter at the command line:

make

In order to run the tests, enter:

make check

Depending on your platform, you might run into some issues. Please check the Makefiles in library/, programs/ and tests/ for options to manually add or remove for specific platforms. You can also check the PolarSSL Knowledge Base for articles on your platform or issue.

In case you find that you need to do something else as well, please let us know what, so we can add it to the KB.

In order to build the source using CMake, just enter at the command line:

cmake .

make

There are 5 different active build modes specified within the CMake buildsystem:

• Release. This generates the default code without any unnecessary information in the binary files.
• Debug. This generates debug information and disables optimization of the code.
• Coverage. This generates code coverage information in addition to debug information.
• ASan. This instruments the code with AddressSanitizer to check for memory errors.
• Check. This activates more compiler warnings and treats them as errors.

Switching build modes in CMake is simple. For debug mode, enter at the command line:

cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:String="Debug" .

In order to run the tests, enter:

make test

The build files for Microsoft Visual Studio are generated for Visual Studio 6.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

The workspace 'polarssl.dsw' contains all the basic projects needed to build the library and all the programs. The files in tests are not generated and compiled, as these need a perl environment as well.

We've included example programs for a lot of different features and uses in programs/. Most programs only focus on a single feature or usage scenario, so keep that in mind when copying parts of the code.

PolarSSL includes an elaborate test suite in tests/ that initially requires Perl to generate the tests files (e.g. test_suite_mpi.c). These files are generates from a function file (e.g. suites/test_suite_mpi.function) and a data file (e.g. suites/test_suite_mpi.data). The function file contains the template for each test function. The data file contains the test cases, specified as parameters that should be pushed into a template function.

We provide some non-standard configurations focused on specific use cases in the configs/ directory. You can read more about those in configs/README.txt

We graciously accept bugs and contributions from the community. There are some requirements we need to fulfil in order to be able to integrate contributions in the main code.

Simple bug fixes to existing code do not contain copyright themselves and we can integrate those without any issue. The same goes for trivial contributions.

For larger contributions, e.g. a new feature, the code possible falls under copyright law. We then need your consent to share in the ownership of the copyright. We have a form for that, which we will mail to you in case you submit a contribution or pull request that we deem this necessary for.

1. Check for open issues or start a discussion around a feature idea or a bug.
2. Fork the PolarSSL repository on Github to start making your changes.
3. Write a test which shows that the bug was fixed or that the feature works as expected.
4. Send a pull request and bug us until it gets merged and published. We will include your name in the ChangeLog :)