On Friday 11 August 2006 11:23 am, Garrett D'Amore wrote:
> Gcc can definitely be made to work. :-)  I've been using cross-compile
> environments with GCC to cross compile whole NetBSD distributions for
> MIPS using a build environment running on my Sun Ultra 20 (running
> Solaris 10).  :-)

GCC was always capable of cross compiling on SPARC, and as a case in point, 
Monta Vista (embedded Linux) used to have a host devlelopment platform based 
on Solaris SPARC for a number of their original distributions. They dropped 
it back in the 1.2 release possibly.

The difficult piece of having the cross compile environment is building the 
toolchain, it actually needs to be built 3 times, if I remember correctly but 
it's been a long time since I have done that. Essentially you need to build 
the compiler to compile the cross platform libraries with, having the host 
and target compiled into the code. It's goes something like build a compiler 
and libs for the target platform, then build another toolchain using them, 
and somehwere there's a 3rd toolchain build in there as I recall.

We could have a cross compiling environment for Solaris on x64 as well, by 
building a similar cross-target toolchain.

There was also a SPARC IIi (or similar name that escapes me) that was used in 
embedded work by a good many folks, and Scientific Atlantic had those 
lightweight embedded SPARC processors in a good many set-top boxes, which 
required cross compiling.

Unfortunate, after Cygnus was acquired by Red Hat, they dropped support for 
that SPARC embedded processor.

-- 

Alan DuBoff - Sun Microsystems
Solaris x86 Engineering - IHV/OEM Group


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