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crosstool vs. building from scratch
- From: Trevor Harmon <trevor at vocaro dot com>
- To: crossgcc at sourceware dot org
- Date: Thu, 9 Feb 2006 13:07:13 -0800
- Subject: crosstool vs. building from scratch
I am reading Karim Yaghmour's book, "Building Embedded Linux
Systems," and in Chapter 4 he goes into great detail about building a
cross-compiling GCC toolchain from scratch. He describes how to
download and compile GCC, binutils, and kernel headers in separate
steps.
In the same year of the book's publication, a set of scripts and
templates called crosstool [1] was released. It automates the entire
process of Yaghmour's Chapter 4 down to a single command (more or
less). I have used crosstool successfully for building PowerPC
executables on an x86 host.
Because I'm new to cross-compiling, I'm curious about the differences
between these two techniques. I've never tried the from-scratch
method, but my assumption is that as long as crosstool can build the
toolchain successfully, then there's no reason to do anything from
scratch.
Is this assumption correct, or are there developers who can use
crosstool but still prefer the from-scratch method (for more
flexibility, for instance)? In other words, if crosstool is working
for me, is there any situation where I would still want to build the
toolchain from scratch?
Thanks,
Trevor
[1] http://kegel.com/crosstool/
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