Build Newlib for SPARC and ARM Architecture

Clone Newlib from its Repository and Build it using RTEMS Toolchain

Vaibhav Gupta

Published in

My GSoC 2019 Journey

3 min readJul 4, 2019

Prerequisites

You must have build RTEMS Toolchain for SPARC and ARM Architecture using RSB.
A Project Sand-boxing is preferred.

What is Newlib?

Newlib is a C standard library implementation intended for use on embedded systems. It is a conglomeration of several library parts, all under free software licenses that make them easily usable on embedded products.
It was created by Cygnus Support as part of building the first GNU cross-development tool-chains. It is now maintained by Red Hat developers and is used in most commercial and non-commercial GCC ports for non-Linux embedded systems.

Wikipedia contributors. (2019, April 12). Newlib. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 13:02, July 4, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newlib&oldid=892195321

Clone

I have mentioned my Project Sand-boxing above, I will be using the same directory structure. You can set it according to you.

$ cd ~/
$ mkdir -p development/newlib
$ cd development/newlib
$ git clone git://sourceware.org/git/newlib-cygwin.git

Conflict in Autoconf versions

Inside the project folder newlib-cygwin , different sub directories are using different versions of autoconf tools.

Refer My another blog to solve this issue: How To Handle Two Versions of autoconf?

Run `autoreconf -fvi`

I need autoconf version 2.64.

$ cd ~/development/newlib/newlib-cygwin
$ export PATH=/opt/autoconf-2.64/bin:$PATH
$ autoreconf -fvi

Task 1 : Build for SPARC

$ cd ~/development/newlib
$ mkdir b-sparc-rterms5-newlib
$ cd b-sparc-rtems5-newlib

Now, I need autoconf version 2.69 and RTEMS Tool Chain

$ export PATH=$HOME/development/rtems/5/bin:$PATH$ ../newlib-cygwin/configure --target=sparc-rtems5 --disable-shared --disable-nls --enable-werror --enable-newlib-supplied-syscalls --enable-interwork --enable-multilib --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld

I you are in contributing to Newlib, you must only build to check if your code is correct, and then install it.

$ make all
$ sudo make install

Task 2: Build for ARM

Photo by Brian Kostiuk - @BriKost on Unsplash

$ cd ~/development/newlib
$ mkdir b-arm-rterms5-newlib
$ cd b-arm-rtems5-newlib

Now, I need autoconf version 2.69 and RTEMS Tool Chain

$ export PATH=$HOME/development/rtems/5/bin:$PATH$ ../newlib-cygwin/configure --target=arm-rtems5 --disable-shared --disable-nls --enable-werror --enable-newlib-supplied-syscalls --enable-interwork --enable-multilib --with-gnu-as --with-gnu-ld

I you are in contributing to Newlib, you must only build to check if your code is correct, and then install it.

$ make all
$ sudo make install

Handling build fail after contributing to Newlib Project

Once you clone and build Newlib for say SPARC. The as you are a developer, you made some changes in newlib source tree. (inside ~/development/newlib/newlib-cygwin )

Then you try to build it again for SPARC.

$ cd ~/development/newlib/b-sparc-rtems5-newlib
$ make all

While re-building it may show error:

Running make distclean didn’t worked for me. So, inside the same directory, I used this command:

$ rm $(find ./ -name \config.cache)

After this, make all worked.

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