Building GCC from sources

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ATTENTION: This page is still a WIP. Usual disclaimers about not taking responsibility for your system disruption applies.

The Miosix repository contains a set of scripts which are used to build the toolchain from sources. These scripts perform the entire building process automatically, from downloading the dependencies, to compiling them, to finally packaging them.

The steps required to use these scripts are similar for all three operating systems supported by the toolchain (macOS, Windows, Linux), but some platform-specific steps are also required.

Before you begin

Building the Miosix toolchain can be time-consuming and stressful for system resources. Make sure the system you intend to build the toolchain on has at least the following system requirements:

  • 4 GB of RAM
  • 4 CPU cores
  • 10 GB of free disk space

Any reasonably modern system will be able to meet these requirements. However notice that the only truly necessary requirement is the free disk space for the build products. Other requirements can be ignored if you are willing to spend quite some time waiting out for the compilation to end.

System dependencies installation

Linux

TODO

Windows

TODO

macOS

Install the Command Line Tools

Install the Command Line Tools by running the following command in terminal: 

xcode-select --install

The command line tools provide clang, clang++, make, bison, flex and headers for the C standard library, the C++ STL, and more tools required for building the toolchain.

It is not necessary to also install Xcode to build the Miosix toolchain, the Command Line Tools suffice.

It is recommended to run the command even if the Command Line Tools were already installed on your system, since the Command Line Tools installation may have been messed up by upgrading from a previous release.

Check the installed packages

If everything went as supposed, running from terminal: 

cc -v

should return some text including: 

Apple clang version 14.0.3 (clang-1403.0.22.14.1)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin22.5.0

Toolchain Sources Download

Download the Miosix git repository

From a terminal, cd to a folder of your choice, making sure that the path from root to it doesn't contain spaces or special characters. Then run: 

git clone https://miosix.org/git-public/miosix-kernel.git
cd miosix-kernel
git fetch origin

To select the development version of the kernel 

git checkout -b testing origin/testing

Please note that currently, the master branch contains the stable kernel, the testing branch contains the current development version, and the unstable branch contains experimental commits that implement more radical restructuring of the code.

Usually the testing branch contains the latest updates made, especially support packages for new boards, so its advised to use the code contained in this branch.

macOS only: If you are building for macOS, use the unstable branch instead, because it is the one where the patches to the compilation scripts for macOS support are currently located. Just replace testing with unstable in the commands shown above.

Make sure the path to your current working directory does not contain spaces, or compiling will fail! You can check the path to the current working directory by running the command pwd. For example: 

/home/foo/temp                          OK
/home/foo/directory with spaces/temp    NO!!

Now move to the compiler directory: 

cd miosix-kernel/miosix/_tools/compiler/gcc-9.2.0-mp3.1

Run the script for downloading the sources

At this point you need to run the dependencies download script. From terminal, run sh download.sh from the folder where you performed the git clone command.

If you want to build a redistributable package, you should also run the command sh installers/additional-download.sh. Do not change the working directory to installers before running this command!

Toolchain install script configuration

The Miosix toolchain install script supports compiling the toolchain in three different ways: 1. Non-redistributable, local install 2. Non-redistributable, global install 3. Redistributable (installable package), global install

The default configuration of the script compiles the toolchain as non-redistributable, with local install. If this is OK for you, skip to the next section.

If you want a different configuration, edit the install script located at: 

miosix-kernel/miosix/_tools/compiler/gcc-9.2.0-mp3.1/install-script.sh

At the beginning of the script, the following lines of code (or similar ones) should appear: 

# Uncomment if installing globally on this system
PREFIX=/opt/arm-miosix-eabi
DESTDIR=
SUDO=sudo
# Uncomment if installing locally on this system, sudo isn't necessary
#PREFIX=`pwd`/gcc/arm-miosix-eabi
#DESTDIR=
#SUDO=
# Uncomment for producing a package for redistribution. The prefix is set to the
# final install directory, but when this script does "make install" files are
# copied with $DESTDIR as prefix. When doing a redistibutable build you also
# have to specify HOST or (on Mac OS), BUILD, see below.
#PREFIX=/opt/arm-miosix-eabi
#DESTDIR=`pwd`/dist
#SUDO=

# Uncomment if targeting a local install. This will use -march= -mtune= flags
# to optimize for your processor, but the code won't be portable to other
# architectures, so don't distribute it
BUILD=
HOST=
# Uncomment if targeting linux 64 bit (distributable)
#BUILD=
#HOST=x86_64-linux-gnu
# Uncomment if targeting windows 64 bit (distributable)
# you have to run this script from Linux anyway (see canadian cross compiling)
#BUILD=
#HOST=x86_64-w64-mingw32
# Uncomment if targeting macOS 64 bit Intel (distributable), compiling on Linux
# Must first install the osxcross toolchain
#BUILD=
#HOST=x86_64-apple-darwin18
# Uncomment if targeting macOS 64 bit Intel (distributable), compiling on macOS
# The script must be run under macOS and without canadian cross compiling
# because it confuses autotools's configuration scripts. Instead we set the
# compiler options for macOS minimum version and architecture in order to be
# able to deploy the binaries on older machines and OS versions. We also must
# force --build and --host to specify a x86_64 cpu to avoid
# architecture-dependent code.
#BUILD=x86_64-apple-darwin17 # No macs exist with a cpu older than a Core 2
#HOST=
#export CFLAGS='-mmacos-version-min=10.13 -O3'
#export CXXFLAGS='-mmacos-version-min=10.13 -O3'

The comments in the source should be sufficiently self-explanatory. Just un-comment the appropriate section depending on the kind of installation you want to perform by removing the hash (#) characters at the beginning of the appropriate lines of code.

Remember to also comment any line of code in this section that is not related to the option you want to choose.

Warning about redistributable packages: The redistributable options are used to build the installable packages that are available on the Miosix Toolchain page. If you want to build the toolchain just for yourself, do not build a redistributable package. Additionally, to build a redistributable package you must have built and installed the toolchain at least once as a non-redistributable global install.

Linux only: By default, in global install mode, the script installs the toolchain in /opt/arm-miosix-eabi, but it also creates symlinks to most tools of interest in /usr/bin. If you do not want to pollute /usr/bin with stuff not installed by your package manager (APT, pacman, ...) comment the following line in the script: 

$SUDO ln -s $DESTDIR$PREFIX/bin/* /usr/bin

After this modification you will also need to manually add /opt/arm-miosix-eabi/bin to your PATH variable to access the toolchain from your shell, for example by modifying your shell profile setup script (.profile or .bashrc or another file depending on your shell).

Toolchain compilation and installation

We can now finally run the compilation script. From terminal, run: 

sh install-script.sh -j`nproc`

macOS only: macOS does not ship with the nproc tool by default, used by the command above to automatically detect the number of CPUs (or CPU cores) available on your system. In case you have not installed this tool manually yourself via a third-party package manager (such as Homebrew or MacPorts) just replace `nproc` in the command above with the number of CPUs you have available.

The install script will print out progress information as it runs. At the end, if everything worked correctly, and if you kept the default configuration (non-redistributable, local install) you'll find the toolchain at: 

miosix-kernel/miosix/_tools/compiler/gcc-9.2.0-mp3.1/gcc/arm-miosix-eabi/bin

If you selected a global install instead, by default the toolchain will be installed here: 

/opt/arm-miosix-eabi/bin

macOS only: Now you need to add the toolchain to your path. Edit the shell profile script (~/.profile) and add the following lines: 

#arm-miosix-eabi
export PATH={my-folder-of-choice-path}/miosix-kernel/miosix/_tools/compiler/gcc-9.2.0-mp3.1/gcc/arm-miosix-eabi/bin:$PATH

where you must replace {my-folder-of-choice-path} with the path of the folder where you run the git clone command. Then run from terminal: 

source .bash_profile

in order to reload the bash profile script.

Cleanup

In order to remove temporary and log files run from the terminal: 

sh cleanup.sh

This script will remove log files and temporary files created during the installation process, but will keep the downloaded files, so that it will be possible to run install-script.sh again without the need for redownloading anything.

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