packaging arm-none-eabi toolchain for cross-development for ARM "bare metal" (no Linux kernel) systems

[Eric Smith]

I've made some progress towards packaging up an arm-none-eabi toolchain 
and newlib for cross-development for ARM platforms that do not run Linux 
(vs. the arm-gp2x-linux toolchain).  Is anyone else interested in this?

Currently I've got packages for:
    binutils-2.20
    newlib-1.18.0 bootstrap (only provides the headers needed to compile 
GCC bootstrap)
    gcc-4.4.3 bootstrap (C only, no libraries, to build newlib)

I'm working on packages for:
    newlib-1.18.0 full
    gcc-4.4.3 full (with C++, using newlib)

I expect to start on gdb soon.

What is the preferred method of getting packages with a bootstrap and/or 
circular dependency issue
into Fedora?  What I've done so far is to have newlib and gcc packages 
both with and without "-bootstrap" in the name, and have gcc-bootstrap 
buildrequires newlib-bootstrap.  newlib can build using either 
gcc-bootstrap or gcc, and I'm not sure how to express that in the spec.  
Then gcc will buildrequire newlib.

I've also considered:

    include newlib sources in the gcc-bootstrap package, to avoid the 
need fora  newlib-bootstrap package

    combine bootstrap and normal specs, with a boostrap variable

The folks packaging mingw32 appear to have been through a bootstrap 
issue somewhat like this, but I'm not sure how they resolved it.  The 
part that seems tricky is ensuring that it is possible to rebuild 
starting from just SRPMs, without having any of the binary RPMs.  (I 
assume that is a requirement, but maybe not?)

Any suggestions are welcome.  And if there's a more appropriate mailing 
list to discuss this, I'm all ears.  The Fedora Embedded SIG page in the 
wiki didn't mention a mailing list.

Thanks,
Eric

[Sergey Rudchenko]

On 02/14/2010 11:25 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
>  I've made some progress towards packaging up an arm-none-eabi
> toolchain
>  and newlib for cross-development for ARM platforms that do not run Linux
>  (vs. the arm-gp2x-linux toolchain).  Is anyone else interested in this?
>      
I wonder if such toolchain can be adopted for Android NDK applications. 
The NDK build system is certainly no the best, I would like to easily 
use CMake or autotools.

The Android NDK uses arm-eabi-4.2.1 GCC toolchain.

Don't I get things wrong?

-- 
Best regards,
Sergey Rudchenko

[Eric Smith]

I wrote:
>  I've made some progress towards packaging up an arm-none-eabi
> toolchain
>  and newlib for cross-development for ARM platforms that do not run Linux
>  (vs. the arm-gp2x-linux toolchain).  Is anyone else interested in this?
>     
Sergey Rudchenko wrote:
>  I wonder if such toolchain can be adopted for Android NDK
> applications. 
>     
Possibly.  While it isn't my objective, anything that can use binutils 
and gcc configured for "arm-none-eabi" should be able to use them.
>  The Android NDK uses arm-eabi-4.2.1 GCC toolchain.
>     
I'm using gcc-4.4.3 because I want recent improvements for ARM Cortex-M3 
microcontrollers.  Unless they've introduced a bug in code generation, I 
imagine that 4.4.3 should be fine for compiling stuff for Android.

Eric

[Adam Williamson]

On Sun, 2010-02-14 at 01:25 -0800, Eric Smith wrote:
>  I've made some progress towards packaging up an arm-none-eabi
> toolchain 
>  and newlib for cross-development for ARM platforms that do not run Linux 
>  (vs. the arm-gp2x-linux toolchain).  Is anyone else interested in this? 
I've used such a toolchain lately for building the linux-msm kernel -
http://gitorious.org/linux-on-qualcomm-s-msm/linux-msm/ - which is used
for various smartphones. I dunno if arm-gp2x would've worked for that
purpose, but hey. So count me as minimally interested. I can't really
help much, though, I'm at the 'monkey see monkey do' stage - I just used
whatever someone told me would do the job, following their instructions
for how to install / use it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net