Advice on developing for an embedded ARM7 target

vespaman

I have a project that includes running an ARM7 (LPC2387) using;

FreeRtos
gcc
binutils
newlib
gdb
i.e. no linux, no gentoo on this box; totally embedded.

How do this the best way? I set off this morning by downloading all sources, and then read about crossdev, which seams useful for this? Is it?

One of my concern is that I would prefer to be able to come back to this project in say, a few years, and not having to spend time updating the code for the gcc that is 'default' at the
time, will this be an issue if I go the crossdev route?

Thanks,
Micael

vespaman · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 12:05 pm Post subject:

OK, so in order to get going, I tried to use crossdev. I admit that I don't understand the 'target part', and I cant find any good source of information for it either. I randomly tried some combinations that I hoped would work, and I got the furthest with;

crossdev -t arm-elf

..but it ends with an error..

in that it does not find arm-elf-cc. I can't find it either, but the following stuff appeared;

arm-elf-addr2line arm-elf-c++filt arm-elf-nm arm-elf-ranlib arm-elf-strings
arm-elf-ar arm-elf-gprof arm-elf-objcopy arm-elf-readelf arm-elf-strip
arm-elf-as arm-elf-ld arm-elf-objdump arm-elf-size

gringo · Advocate Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 3793

i think you should have a look to this -> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/base/embedded/handbook/ , it clarified a lot of things for me when i first played with several arm5 based devices.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 1:50 pm Post subject:

Moved from Portage & Programming to Gentoo on Alternative Architectures.

There is a gentoo-embedded project they also have a channel on freenode, probably #gentoo-embedded
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NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

vespaman · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 1:55 pm Post subject:

Thanks,

I have read the embedded handbook, and while it spreads som light, 3b does not mention newlib at all (while crossdev does).

And using a line like;

# crossdev -t arm-unknown-elf-newlib

.. only gives

checking target system type... Invalid configuration `arm-unknown-elf-newlib': machine `arm-unknown-elf' not recognized

So, that's why I was happy to see that a simple -t arm-elf at least continues the make a few steps further.

gringo · Advocate Joined: 27 Apr 2003 Posts: 3793

ok, i searched a bit in bugzilla and found this, which looks like a similar issue.
Does it work if you run :

crossdev -t arm-elf --without-headers

?

maybe not using latest versions of everything may help a bit too, specially the gcc version can be a critical part.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 3:09 pm Post subject:

vespaman,

Have you seen handhelds.org ?

Familiar is a Linux for handheld devices, including some ARM based ones.
If you cannot use familiar directly, they used to have directions for getting a cross development system running.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

vespaman · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 4:20 pm Post subject:

vespaman · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2008 4:23 pm Post subject:

vespaman · Posted: Sat Sep 06, 2008 11:25 am Post subject:

regomodo · Guru Joined: 25 Mar 2008 Posts: 445

I know this is necro-bumping but I just had the same error.

Found that using --without headers and not using -S worked for me to get rid of the newlibs errors.