.png){kind=small}
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.
