Alan DuBoff wrote: > 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. > >
This kind of set up is used for Sun Ray development, which uses a microSPARC-IIe. There was also the original SPARClite which was used in the control board on the E10K. Those were both embedded, MMU-less environments. (Okay, original Sun Ray had an MMU, but the "newer" units (not Sun Ray 2) used Copernicus, which was pretty much an msiiep sans MMU.) NetBSD, when I have watched it, bootstraps only the build environment twice. Once to bootstrap the ANSI compiler, and then once again to go from minimalist (and maybe suspect) ANSI compiler to self-compiled full build tools. On my Ultra 20 (amd64, 1.8GHz) it takes maybe 20-30 minutes to bootstrap the build tools. Its well over an hour on the Sun Blade 100. -- Garrett D'Amore, Principal Software Engineer Tadpole Computer / Computing Technologies Division, General Dynamics C4 Systems http://www.tadpolecomputer.com/ Phone: 951 325-2134 Fax: 951 325-2191 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
