[Buildroot] ARM EABI builds

[Ben Dooks <ben@fluff.org>]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 11:25:00PM +0100, Ben Dooks wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 02:19:19PM -0700, Tom wrote:
> > Ben Dooks wrote:
> > >Has anyone had success with building an EABI buildroot? I have tried
> > >building ARM (arm920t,gcc 4.1.2) and the image produced hangs (it
> > >seems vfprintf does not work)
> > >
> > >I have succesfully built images with gcc 4.1.2 and a patch to make it
> > >build gcc with OABI.
> > >
> > 
> > Yes, I had success. (After an issue described in "[Buildroot] Arm / 
> > buildroot / kernel issue: init crashes?", maybe this is your problem too.)
> 
> Next time, could you please post an URL, it doesn't seem to be trivially
> findable with google.
> 
> I have tried EABI build with what should be an EABI only kernel, and this
> still shows that /bin/sh is not running to a point where you can interact
> with it.

I have finally tracked down the problem, and will be submitting a
fix as soon as I have reviewed the patch.

The basic problem is as so:

1) Buildroot asks for the processor type (ARM920,etc)
2) Buildroot does not pass this to gcc when building
3) GCC makes a guess about architecture based on internal configuration
4) GCC EABI defaults to ARMv5
5) ARMv5 produces instructions that cannot execute on ARMv4
6) applications fail to work due to invalid instructions in libgcc

The first part of the solution is to pass --with-cpu=<cpu> to the
gcc configuration, thus forcing the use of a particular cpu and
architecture.

The next thing is, do we then need to produce our compiler and
libraries in toolchain_arm_<cpu>_<fp> and build_arm_<cpu>_<fp> ?

-- 
Ben

Q:      What's a light-year?
A:      One-third less calories than a regular year.