rm5200

So, last time I was trying to get Gentoo’s portage to cross-build gcc so that I’d have a C/C++ compiler in my ARMv5 musl environment.

It is literally the last piece of the puzzle.  Once compiled, that is the last step I need before I can throw the shiny new environment onto an ARMv5 VM (or real ARMv5 CPU), do an emerge -e world on it then tar the lot up and throw it at Catalyst.

Building an entire OS on a 454MHz ARMv5 machine with 128MB RAM does not faze me one bit… I used to do it regularly on a (Gateway-branded) Cobalt Qube II server appliance, which sports a 250MHz QED RM5231 and 128MB RAM.  The other compile workhorse I used in those days was an SGI O2; 300MHz RM5200, again 128MB RAM.

Yes, Linux and its userland has bulked up a bit in the last 10 years, but not so much so that a build on these is impossible.

Certainly, native building is easier than cross-compiling.  Cross-compilers have always been a voodoo art for me.  Getting one that will build a Linux kernel or U-Boot, usually isn’t too hard… but get userland involved and it gets complex.  Throw in C++ and complexity skyrockets!

I’m taking OpenADK for a spin now, and in concept, it’s exactly what I remember buildroot used to be.  It’s a tool for generating a fully fledged embedded Linux system with a wide package selection including development tools.  I also find that you have to hold your tongue just right to get stuff to compile.

Selecting a generic arm926ej-s; it succeeded to build a x86-64 hosted cross-toolchain once, but then silently refused to build anything else.  I told it instead to build for a Versatile PB with an arm926ej-s CPU… it failed to build the cross-toolchain, even though it pretty much is the exact same target.

A make cleandirs later, and it happily started building everything, but then hiccupped on permissions, so against my better judgement, I’m running it now with sudo, and things are progressing.  With some luck, I should have something that will give me a working native gcc/g++ for musl on ARMv5.