Re: crosstool-0.28-rc16 doubts

[Daniel Kegel <dank at kegel dot com>]

John Lenz wrote:
> On 2004.05.18 10:28, Kai Ruottu wrote:
> >   After thinking what most people on this list must be doing
> > with their individualistic toolchains, it seems that nobody
> > here thinks to produce any 'rock-solid' binaries for these
> > existing Linux/ARM systems. But are porting their own Linuces
> > for their own hardware in order to compete with the existing
> > PDAs etc.  Or some really would like to do just that but are
> > mislead to the embedded "hardware and software from scratch"
> > area... Or the existing Linuces for those PDAs aren't good
> > enough for them.

The only linux distributions which have the desirable property
of building absolutely everything from scratch with a cross-compiler
(at least last time I checked) are PTXDist and Rock Linux
(and then there's uclinux and its buildroot script, but that's
uclibc specific, I think).

Rock Linux's configuration system is arcane, and they aren't really
well suited for embedded systems.

PTXDist uses the kernel's menuconfig and nested Makefile system,
which works ok for apps, and it does handle embedded systems fairly well.
However, the menuconfig/nested Makefile build system really gets
confusing when it comes to the toolchain; I prefer to use
crosstool to build the toolchain, and then use PTXDist to build
userland.

So while I would dearly love to just use an existing distro,
only PTXDist meets my needs, and only if I ignore its toolchain
building stuff.

> uclibc is a possible future alternative for the openzaurus project.  I  
> am currently working on ways to test the toolchain on the zaurus itself  
> to determine if uclibc will work for us.

There's a patch to add uclibc support to crosstool.  I plan to
apply it after 0.28.

> I "need" a cross toolchain because I am developing OpenZaurus and  
> openembedded.  I am currently testing how crosstool builds a toolchain  
> so I can compare it to how we are building a toolchain.
>
> The openembedded project's goal is to provide everything needed  
> (including gcc and glibc/uclibc) to build (and test) an embedded linux  
> image.  Note this isn't vaporware either, we have had a booting image  
> for a while now.  We aren't quite ready for a stable release, since  
> development is still progressing rapidly!

Excellent.  One of the reasons I wrote crosstool was to serve
as a reference so people could see a working example.  Hope it's
useful for you.  (I even hope you might incorporate it into your
distro, but won't be offended if you keep your old way of building
toolchains.)
- Dan


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