ARM Toolchain – Crosstool

Was able to get an arm-elf toolchain built and working fine, but not so much luck in building an arm-elf-linux toolchain. It cross-compiled programs without errors, but the compiled executable crapped out at runtime. So googling for answers… I came across Dan Kegel’s crosstool – a really cool GNU toolchain builder. It downloads all the correct gcc, glibc, binutils, etc. and builds your toolchain. I built two toolchains, arm-unknown-linux and arm-xscale-linux. The toolchain built with it works great.

Note:
The Ubuntu shell is not bash by default! Instead it is linked to something called dash. Just make sure you relink /bin/sh to bash instead of dash. No idea when they did this, but I found that out after encountering this maddening error, pointing to some header files during the build:

missing terminating ” character.

Using it:

Example (for kernel compilation makefile):

export ARM_TOOLCHAIN=/opt2/crosstool/arm-unknown-linux-gnu/bin
export PATH=$ARM_TOOLCHAIN:$PATH

make ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-unknown-linux-gnu-

ARM Toolchain

Updated (April 26, 2008)

Here’s how I built a 64-bit GNU ARM toolchain (cross-compiler x64 to ARM). So far this has been working well for me on an LPC2148 (ARM7TDMI-S), i.e. gcc and gdb via OpenOCD JTAG.

Notes:

1. Some builds (like binutils-2.18 and newlib-1.15) needed the setting MAKEINFO=/usr/bin/makeinfo to be passed to the make (binutils-2.17 and newlib-1.16 didn’t need this).
2. Update: some systems (like Ubuntu 8.10) have strict checking turned on, where warnings are treated as errors. You may need to disable this the build of binutils and gdb using the –disable-werror configuration option.

Here are the steps:

environment (needed only for build):

export BINUTILS_VERSION=2.18
export GCC_VERSION=4.2.3
export NEWLIB_VERSION=1.16.0
export GDB_VERSION=6.8
.
export DIST=/opt1/gnuarm.dist    # tars will be downloaded here
export WORKDIR=/opt4/gnuarm.tmp    # tars will be unzipped and built here
export GNUARM_HOME=/opt/gnuarm   # Resulting binaries will be installed here
.
export SRC=$WORKDIR/src
export BUILD=$WORKDIR/build
export PREFIX=$GNUARM_HOME
export TARGET=arm-elf
.
md -p $DIST
md -p $SRC
md -p $BUILD
.
sudo mkdir -p $PREFIX

download:

cd $DIST
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-${BINUTILS_VERSION}.tar.bz2
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-${GCC_VERSION}/gcc-${GCC_VERSION}.tar.bz2
wget ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-${GDB_VERSION}.tar.bz2
wget ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/newlib/newlib-${NEWLIB_VERSION}.tar.gz
wget http://www.gnuarm.com/t-arm-elf

untar:

cd $SRC
tar jxf $DIST/binutils-${BINUTILS_VERSION}.tar.bz2
tar jxf $DIST/gcc-${GCC_VERSION}.tar.bz2
tar jxf $DIST/gdb-${GDB_VERSION}.tar.bz2
tar zxf $DIST/newlib-${NEWLIB_VERSION}.tar.gz
cp $DIST/t-arm-elf gcc-${GCC_VERSION}/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf

binutils:

md $BUILD/binutils
cd $BUILD/binutils
$SRC/binutils-${BINUTILS_VERSION}/configure –target=$TARGET –prefix=$PREFIX –enable-interwork –enable-multilib
make all install 2>&1 | tee make.out

gcc core:

md $BUILD/gcc
cd $BUILD/gcc
$SRC/gcc-${GCC_VERSION}/configure –target=$TARGET –prefix=$PREFIX
–enable-interwork –enable-multilib –enable-languages=”c,c++” –with-newlib –with-headers=$SRC/newlib-${NEWLIB_VERSION}/newlib/libc/include

make all-gcc install-gcc 2>&1 | tee make.out

newlib:

md $BUILD/newlib
cd $BUILD/newlib
$SRC/newlib-${NEWLIB_VERSION}/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=$PREFIX –enable-interwork –enable-multilib

make all install 2>&1 | tee make.out

gcc (phase two):

cd $BUILD/gcc
make all install 2>&1 | tee make.out

gdb:

md $BUILD/gdb
cd $BUILD/gdb
$SRC/gdb-${GDB_VERSION}/configure –target=$TARGET –prefix=$PREFIX –enable-interwork –enable-multilib

make all install 2>&1 | tee make.out

post-setup:

echo ‘export GNUARM_HOME=/opt/gnuarm’ >> ~/.profile
echo ‘export PATH=$GNUARM_HOME/bin:$PATH’ >> ~/.profile

The scripts can be downloaded from here.