Yet another quick build of arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi

So I decide to check what is going on with crosstool-ng and refresh my old post about building arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi toolchain. Last post was pretty popular, so definitely this is direction I should follow :). I will not repeat myself, so if you encounter any problems please check last post, section with known problems in crosstool-ng doc/ directory or RTFM. Let’s begin:

Get the latest crosstool-ng

As usual I’m trying to use latest version possible. Following the crosstool-ng page:

hg clone http://crosstool-ng.org/hg/crosstool-ng
cd crosstool-ng
./bootstrap

At the time of writing this article my changeset was 3200:0fc56e62cecf 16 Mar 2013, two weeks old.

Installation

I prefer to use local directory for ct-ng in case it will change in feature I will not need to mess with /usr subsystem. Simply tryin' to keep it clean when I can.

mkdir $HOME/ct-ng
./configure --prefix=$HOME/ct-ng
make
make install

No problems on my up to date Debian wheezy. You will probably want to add $HOME/ct-ng to your PATH

export PATH="$HOME/ct-ng/bin:${PATH}"

Add bash completion as it is advised in message at the end of compilation process. My .bashrc automatically sources $HOME/.bash_completion so there is a place for local code completion.

cat ct-ng.comp >> $HOME/.bash_completion

Build sample toolchain

There is a long list of predefined samples toolchains which you can get build. If ct-ng bash completion was correctly added, than you can explore it by <Tab> or simply ct-ng list-samples. Let’s try to build arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi:

mkdir -p $HOME/embedded/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi
cd $HOME/embedded/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi
ct-ng arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi

Before you start build consider some debugging options to make build process easier to continue when problems encountered.

Additional debugging options

crosstool-ng contain interesting mechanism of saving finished phases of toolchain. This helps when for some reason our build process failed. To enable this feature simply enter menuconfig:

ct-ng menuconfig

Mark option Paths and mix options -> Debug crosstool-NG -> Save intermediate steps as enabled. If something goes wrong you can check what last state was by:

ls -lt .build/arm-unknown-linux-gnueabi/state

Directory on top with the latest modification date is now your first state where you should restart after fail. To restart build in given point:

ct-ng <state>+ #assuming that <state> is where we fail last time

Ordered list of possible states can be retrieved by ct-ng list-steps.

Start build

ct-ng build.4

4 is the number of concurrent jobs and depends on your setup performance. Building process takes a while so make coffee or anything else to drink :).

Known problems

I encounter few different problems than during previous building.

Missing expat library

Signature looks like that:

[ERROR]    configure: error: expat is missing or unusable
[ERROR]    make[3]: *** [configure-gdb] Error 1
[ERROR]    make[2]: *** [all] Error 2

Simply install libexpat:

sudo apt-get install libexpat1-dev

gcj internal error

Few times I encountered something like this:

[ERROR]    gcj: internal compiler error: Killed (program jc1)
[ERROR]    make[5]: *** [ecjx] Error 4
[ERROR]    make[4]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
[ERROR]    make[3]: *** [all-target-libjava] Error 2
[ERROR]    make[2]: *** [all] Error 2

The reason is that oom_kiler takes care about gcj. It means that you run out of memory during compilation Java related code. I experience that when trying to build toolchain with 512MB of RAM :) So this was short reminder. I work on new post about creating virtual embedded development environment based on qemu. I was inspired by this article. Hope this article was useful. If you have any comments or difficulties please comment below. If think this post was useful - share.


Piotr Król
Founder and Embedded Systems Consultant at 3mdeb as well as freelance CTO of Vitro Technology and CEO of LPN Plant. Passionate about building firmware that enables advanced hardware features in modern products. Dedicated to customers that treat embedded software security and upgradeability as forethought. Open source firmware evangelist interested in platform security and trusted computing. In favor of fixed price projects with a clear definition of success.