Re: Building gcc as a cross compiler

["Lewin A.R.W. Edwards" <larwe at larwe dot com>]

Hi Christophe,

>Thanks for your advices, in fact I chose coff because I thought ELF was
>Linux-specific but I'll reconsider that

No. We are building ROMmed code that originates as ELF, it's just a file 
format... binutils will do all the conversion for you; it's great :)

Of course, it is possible to use arm-coff, if you need to.

>As a matter of fact, I tried to build GCC under Cygwin, also as a cross
>compiler, but I got an error message in the winnt.h file so I thought it was

There are numerous gotchas with cygwin, but by far (by FAR FAR) the biggest 
is the issue of text-mode versus binary mode mount points. Also note that 
you cannot build gcc under cygwin inside Windows 95/98. You must be running 
NT (including Win2000). It is possible, once you have built the toolchain, 
to move across and do the rest of your development work in Win9x but I do 
not recommend it (I was doing it for 3 months or so... very annoying).

>not compatible. I'll try your command line to see if I can progress under
>Cygwin too since I'd rather work on my Windows workstation than on our old
>Linux server...

I can tell you for a certain fact that it doesn't work with the current 
sources in cygwin, which is why I was posting here for support :) As long 
as you don't need the C compiler to generate Thumb code, you can use gcc 
2.95.2. Just EXACTLY FOLLOW the installation instructions at 
<http://sources.redhat.com/ecos/tools/win-arm-elf.html>.

If you continue to have problems, I can email you a (20Mb!!) precompiled 
set of binutils 2.10/gcc 2.95.2/insight 5.0 (gdb with graphical front-end) 
for cygwin.

=== Lewin A.R.W. Edwards (Embedded Engineer)
Work: http://www.digi-frame.com/
Personal: http://www.zws.com/ and http://www.larwe.com/

"Und setzet ihr nicht das Leben ein,
Nie wird euch das Leben gewonnen sein."