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Nov 26 2008

Compiling a toolchain for ARM7 under Ubuntu

Posted by Madox in Microcontrollers, Software, Software Tips & Tricks, tags: , , ,

Well this chronicles my first attempt at compiling a toolchain for programming ARM’s in ELF code.

Why do I need a toolchain for programming ARMs?

  1. I found a LPC2378-STK development board in my room
  2. I want to give ARM programming a try (PS WinAVR is great for programming AVRs)
  3. I found I have some spare ARM7 LPC2378′s lying around (WTF?) and thought I’ll actually complete my Chumby Speedometer on my car project!

The compile process should be pretty straight forward, but I made a few stuffup’s along the way.

  • I had originally wanted to keep it neat and install to a new directory, then the PATH annoyance thing hit me.  Setting the path under my user shell didn’t carry over when using sudo which is required to make install.  Solved using sudo -s, but then in the end i just redid it all and installed to /usr/local/.
  • Realised (should have known) that you need ‘GMP’ and ‘MPFR’ to compile GCC.  Available as packages libgmp3-dev and libmpfr-dev in Ubuntu.
  • Did my usual of forgetting to set up the prefix install location when configuring…minor boo boo

Setting it all up

Install any packages you need… build-essential is probably essential… GMP and MPFR could be got by using

sudo apt-get install libgmp3-dev libmpfr-dev

Set-up some directories…I opted to use create an ‘arm-elf’ directory in my home to hold both the source and build directories…

cd ~
mkdir arm-elf arm-elf/src
cd ~/arm-elf/src

Get the latest sources…

Get the latest sources for binutils, gcc, newlib, insight (click the links if you need).  The versions I used should be obvious from the filenames below.  Just be wary that the insight front page is not kept up to date but you’ll find the latest if you follow any of the release links anyway.

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
wget http://gcc.releasenotes.org/releases/gcc-4.3.2/gcc-4.3.2.tar.bz2
wget ftp://sources.redhat.com/pub/newlib/newlib-1.16.0.tar.gz
wget ftp://sourceware.org/pub/insight/releases/insight-6.8.tar.bz2

Unpack the sources…

tar -xvjf binutils-2.19.tar.bz2
tar -xvjf gcc-4.3.2.tar.bz2
tar -xvzf newlib-1.16.0.tar.gz
tar -xvjf insight-6.8.tar.bz2

Tweak the gcc source config…

Make a minor config tweak to the gcc source.  Edit gcc-4.3.2/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf and append mno-thumb-interwork/mthumb-interwork after MULTILIB_OPTIONS and normal interwork after MULTILIB_DIRNAMES.  I used nano, see the screenshot below if I haven’t been too clear :)

nano ~/arm-elf/src/gcc-4.3.2/gcc/config/arm/t-arm-elf

Start building with fingers crossed…

Now we can start building the toolchain.  Note my prefix is /usr/local.  First off binutils!

cd ~/arm-elf/
mkdir build build/binutils-2.19 build/insight-6.8 build/gcc-4.3.2 build/newlib-1.16.0

cd ~/arm-elf/build/binutils-2.19
~/arm-elf/src/binutils-2.19/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Next just the gcc part of gcc…note we configure the newlib src headers here…

cd ~/arm-elf/build/gcc-4.3.2
~/arm-elf/src/gcc-4.3.2/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror –enable-languages=”c,c++” –with-newlib  –with-headers=~/arm-elf/src/newlib-1.16.0/newlib/libc/include
sudo make all-gcc install-gcc

Now newlib…

cd ~/arm-elf/build/newlib-1.16.0
~/arm-elf/src/newlib-1.16.0/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Coming back for the rest off gcc (needed newlib)

cd ~/arm-elf/build/gcc-4.3.2
sudo make all install

…and finally insight gdb

cd ~/arm-elf/build/insight-6.8
~/arm-elf/src/insight-6.8/configure –target=arm-elf –prefix=/usr/local –enable-interwork –enable-multilib –with-float=soft –disable-werror
sudo make all install

Voila done!  I should now have all my arm-elf tools!  Just a check…

madox@madox-laptop:/usr/local/bin$ ls arm*
arm-elf-addr2line  arm-elf-gcc        arm-elf-insight  arm-elf-run
arm-elf-ar         arm-elf-gcc-4.3.2  arm-elf-ld       arm-elf-size
arm-elf-as         arm-elf-gccbug     arm-elf-nm       arm-elf-strings
arm-elf-c++        arm-elf-gcov       arm-elf-objcopy  arm-elf-strip
arm-elf-c++filt    arm-elf-gdb        arm-elf-objdump
arm-elf-cpp        arm-elf-gdbtui     arm-elf-ranlib
arm-elf-g++        arm-elf-gprof      arm-elf-readelf

Yup all there and runs :)   Now the search for the LPC header files… argh

PS : If you copy and paste my commands, be wary of line breaks… I didn’t put \’s anywhere…

Please Flattr me if you found this useful :)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 26th, 2008 at 09:55 and is filed under Microcontrollers, Software, Software Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Compiling a toolchain for ARM7 under Ubuntu”
  1. Ronald Sudjian says:
    December 15, 2008 at 04:41

    Hi,
    I have been using GCC-4.2.2 for a while with the lpc2148. I had been setting up GCC a little differently.

    I tried your method and it worked for GCC-4.2.2 and GCC-4.2.3. When your method for GCC-4.3.1 and
    GCC-4.3.2 my project code developed a problem. I will describe a simplified version.

    volatile unsigned int tick = 0;
    volatile unsigned in pwm_tick;

    int main()
    {
    while (1) {
    if (tick != pwm_tick) {
    tick = pwm_tick;
    process();
    }
    }

    The pwm_tick is a counter that is incremented every 10 msec in a interrupt routine.
    The “if” statement body was never being executed. I found after examining the generated
    code that the register load for “tick” or “pwm_tick” was not being branched to. Only one of
    the variables was getting loaded before the compare. I fixed it easily. The generated code
    for GCC-4.3.2 looks to have some further optimization steps.

    I was wondering if you think GCC-4.3.2 would be good for a part like a lpc2900 series which
    has a ARM9?

    Thanks for posting your method,

    Ron Sudjian

    Reply
  2. Nigel Teskle says:
    January 22, 2009 at 09:16

    It is so difficult to install that into ubuntu.

    I only do yum install arm-* on fedora 10

    Reply
  3. Scott says:
    March 25, 2009 at 11:51

    I just wanted to let you know that you list the wrong package above for GMP. That is a development library for a music project….you wanted to list:

    libgmp3-dev

    Reply
  4. Madox says:
    March 25, 2009 at 18:21

    Good find Scott :) I wrote the post after the event and just used ‘gmp’ tab on the command line to try remember all the packages. It is indeed libgmp3-dev and I’ve updated the post for anyone reading it in the future.

    Refer : http://packages.debian.org/unstable/libdevel/libgmp3-dev

    Reply
  5. Shane says:
    June 1, 2009 at 06:24

    Anyone getting build problems with insight might have to apt-get install textinfo
    Makeinfo was missing on server 9.04
    Thanks for guide

    Reply
  6. Luiz says:
    October 6, 2009 at 14:53

    About the textinfo….

    Try texinfo ( apt-get install texinfo )

    XD

    Reply
  7. Andreas says:
    December 11, 2010 at 00:37

    Great stuff, worked like a charm and I was later to build my LPC2103-stuff in Ubunto (I’ve only before built it in Windows using the Embedded Artist’s ref. environment).

    Reply
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