编译一个Cortex-M3 gcc toolchain

    前段时间一直在用IAR开发一款基于Luminary LM3S系列芯片的产品，可是在加入TCP/IP协议栈的时候遇到了32K的代码限制，在google上搜索了好几天都没有找到破解版本（想省点银子），结果大失所望，要么就是4.10的keygen，5.10的keygen竟然不好用。

    天无绝人之路，本还没打算这么早投入gcc怀抱，看来只能提前了。在写这篇文章的时候，已经能够用OpenOCD下载由arm-elf-gcc编译的firmware，并且能够设置断点。后续文章将做介绍，现在就把编译gcc的过程贴出来，老外写的E文，我就不翻译了，有些做了点修改。

［操作系统］ UBUNTU 8.04 / 8.10。比较推荐用这个系统，好用。

 

This tutorial explains how you can create a GCC+Newlib toolchain that can be used to compile programs for the Cortex (Thumb2) architecture, thus making it possible to use GCC to compile programs for the increasingly number of Cortex CPUs out there (Luminary Micro, ST, with new Cortex CPUs being announced by Atmel and other companies). I am writing this tutorial because I needed to work on a Cortex CPU for the eLua project and I couldn't find anywhere a complete set of instructions for building GCC for this architecture. You'll need such a toolchain if you want to compile eLua for Cortex-M3 CPUs.

DISCLAIMER: I'm by no means a specialist in the GCC/newlib/binutils compilation process. I'm sure that there are better ways to accomplish what I'm describing here, however I just wanted a quick and dirty way to build a toolchain, I have no intention in becoming too intimate with the build process. If you think that what I did is wrong, innacurate, or simply outrageously ugly, feel free to contact us and I'll make the necessary corrections. And of course, this tutorial comes without any guarantees whatsoever.

 

Prerequisites

To build your toolchain you'll need:

• a computer running Linux: I use Ubuntu 8.04, but any Linux will do as long as you know how to find the equivalent of "apt-get" for your distribution. I won't be going into details about this, google it and you'll sure find what you need. It is also assumed that the Linux system already has a "basic" native toolchain installed (gcc/make and related). This is true for Ubuntu after installation. Again, you might need to check your specific distribution.
• GNU binutils: get it from here. At the moment of writing this, the latest versions is 2.18, which for some weird reason refuses to compile on my system, so I'm using 2.17 instead. UPDATE: you MUST use the new binutils 2.19 distribution for the Cortex toolchain, since it fixes some assembler issues. You won't be able to compile eLua 0.5 or higher if you don't use binutils 2.19.
• GCC: since support for Cortex (Thumb2) was only introduced staring with version 4.3.0, you'll need to download version 4.3.0 or newer. As I'm writing this, the latest GCC version is 4.3.1, which I'll be using for this tutorial. Download it from here after choosing a suitable mirror.
• Newlib: as I'm writing this, the latest official Newlib version is 1.16.0. However, the CVS version contains some fixes for the Thumb2 architecture, some of them in very important functions (like setjmp/longjmp), so you'll need to fetch the sources from CVS (this will most likely change when a new official Newlib version is released). So go to http://sourceware.org/newlib/download.html and follow the instructions there in order to get the latest sources from CVS.
• Also, the tutorial assumes that you're using bash as your shell. If you use something else, you might need to adjust some shell-specific commands.

Also, you need some support programs/libraries in order to compile the toolchain. To install them:

$ sudo apt-get install flex bison libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev autoconf texinfo build-essential

Next, decide where you want to install your toolchain. They generally go in /usr/local/, so I'm going to assume /usr/local/cross-cortex for this tutorial. To save yourself some typing, set this path into a shell variable:

$ mkdir /opt/cross-cortex                                                                                                   

$ export TOOLPATH=/opt/cross-cortex                                                                              

Step 1: binutils

This is the easiest step: unpack, configure, build.

$ tar -xvjf binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
$ cd binutils-2.19
$ mkdir build
$ cd build
$ ../configure --target=arm-elf --prefix=$TOOLPATH --enable-interwork --enable-multilib --with-gnu-as --with-gn