i386-elf-compiler-collection

• About
• Supported platforms
• Downloading precompiled packages
• How to build

About

This buildscript downloads, compiles and installs GNU Binutils and GNU GCC targetting the i386-elf platform as a cross-compiler. It can be used to build the i386-elf-binutils and i386-elf-gcc cross-compilers on different architectures. A typical use case for this is people interested in operating systems development.

Supported platforms

The following platforms have been tested and are known to work:

• GNU/Linux - both i686 and x86_64.
• MacOS X - x86_64 (i686 is deprecated).
• Windows / MinGW - i686 (x86_64 is still not tested).

Downloading precompiled packages

Please note that the building process can take several minutes depending on the specs of your computer. On a relatively new computer it might take a few minutes. On an older computer might take an hour or even more. Also, it has been found that the build process is extremely slow in Windows due to the MinGW emulation.

Several precompiled packages have been provided as is and are available at the releases page of this repository. Download a precompiled package for your architecture and follow the installation instructions to get an usable environment.

How to build

You can also build the compiler on your own if you prefer.

Your host computer needs to have the following software installed: gcc, g++, flex, bison, texinfo and wget. Several libraries required for building GCC such as gmp, mpc and mpfr are download and precompiled by the script. They can be installed too to speed up the build process.

Note for Windows users: you need to set up an usable UNIX environment on your Windows system such as MingW or MSYS to run the buildscripts. Cygwin has not been tested although I'm interested in.

Once your system is ready, clone the repository, download as ZIP or get the script on any way and run it. Usage:

./buildcomp -p <prefix> [-l <log_file>] [-v]

Options:

• -p : the script will install the compiler suite to . This argument is required and the script has to be provided with a valid directory: it has to exist and the script must be able to write to it. The script will refuse to work otherwise.
• -v: if provided, will print to the console the output of the build process (such as the output made by make and configure).
• -l <log_file>: if provided, will save the output of the build process to the log file with the name hereby given.