bleeding-edge-toolchain

All-in-one script to build bleeding-edge-toolchain for ARM microcontrollers.

bleeding-edge-toolchain - what it's all about?

Toolchain for Linux

Due to the fact that building a binary on "Linux distribution A" that would work on "Linux distribution B" (where "Linux distribution B" may just be "Linux distribution A 6 months later after a few upgrades") is really hard (impossible?), there will be no binary packages for Linux. This script and some spare CPU time (~2 hours) is all you need.

To build native toolchain for Linux just run the script with no arguments:

./build-bleeding-edge-toolchain.sh

Most of the tools required by the script should be already present in your system, but some may be missing. Generally the tools listed below should be enough to successfully execute this script:

• obvious tools needed to compile anything - like gcc, binutils, make and coreutils
• m4, which is required to execute configure scripts
• curl, used to download the source tarballs of toolchain components
• tar, used to extract source tarballs and to compress a compiled toolchain
• texinfo and texlive, (optional) used to generate documentation
• python, required by GDB, may be either version 2 or 3, but should contain headers and libraries, so you may need some kind of "development" and/or "library" package, depending on your system

The exact set of required packages will be different on each system, but on a fresh Ubuntu installation you are going to need just these packages: curl, m4, python2.7-dev and optionally: texinfo and texlive.

Toolchain for Windows

As Windows is at the opposite end of spectrum when it comes to binary compatibility, the packages for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows are available on Freddie Chopin's website in Download > Software > bleeding-edge-toolchain. If you choose the easy path, just download an archive, extract it with 7-zip and add .../bin folder to your system's PATH environment variable.

If you want to also build a toolchain for 32-bit and/or 64-bit Windows pass --enable-win32 and/or --enable-win64 as arguments for the script, like this:

./build-bleeding-edge-toolchain.sh --enable-win32 --enable-win64

Such compilation has more dependencies:

• Mingw-w64, namely i686-w64-mingw32-gcc (for 32-bit version) and/or x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc (for 64-bit version) with their own dependencies (binutils, headers, ...)
• libtermcap and libwinpthread compiled for Mingw-w64
• p7zip, used to compress the toolchain into an archive in .7z format

Additional options

• --keep-build-folders will cause all build folders to be left intact after the build, by default - if this option is not provided - all build folders are removed as soon as they are not needed anymore
• --resume will try to resume the last (interrupted) build instead of starting from scratch; be advised that this option is experimental and may not work reliably in all possible cases - if in doubt or in case of strange errors just don't use it to perform a clean build
• --skip-documentation will skip building html/pdf documentation in the subprojects, by default - if this option is not provided - the documentation is built, requiring texlive/texinfo
• --skip-nano-libraries will skip building of "nano" libraries, by default - if this option is not provided - "nano" libraries will be built, making the whole process take significantly longer
• --quiet will make the build slightly less noisy