Crosstool-NG 1.7.0, Bootlin contributed basic Blackfin support

Yann E. Morin, maintainer of Crosstool-NG, has just announced version 1.7.0 of his toolchain building tool we like so much at Bootlin. For the record, Crosstool-NG allows to build cross-compiling toolchains for a wide-range of architectures, using either glibc, uClibc, eglibc or newlib, and everything is configured through a menuconfig interface, familiar to all embedded Linux developers.

Blackfin architectureBootlin has contributed to this release, by adding some support for the Blackfin architecture, on which we have been working recently. Crosstool-NG is now capable of generating a FDPIC cross-compiling toolchain for Blackfin. FDPIC allows to use shared libraries even on no-MMU architectures like the Blackfin. This support of Blackfin in Crosstool-NG is only the beginning, a lot of work remains to be done to make sure that the toolchain works really well, and to support FLAT binaries and bare-metal as well.

Here are the patches that Bootlin has contributed for this release :

The other major changes for this release are :

  • two new architectures have been added: Blackfin and mips64
  • building canadian-crosses has been enhanced
  • experimental support for gcc-4.5 has been added
  • eglibc can be optimized for size (instead of speed)
  • companion libraries can be built statically, removing the need for a wrapper
  • many components versions have been added, and associated patchsets updated
  • some less important new features, or enhancements for stability and usability
  • a lot of bug-fixes, of which some to help on Darwin & *BSD

The 1.7.0 release can be downloaded at http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/download/crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng-1.7.0.tar.bz2 and the homepage of the Crosstool-NG project is http://ymorin.is-a-geek.org/projects/crosstool. Enjoy !

Author: Thomas Petazzoni

Thomas Petazzoni is Bootlin's co-owner and CEO. Thomas joined Bootlin in 2008 as a kernel and embedded Linux engineer, became CTO in 2013, and co-owner/CEO in 2021. More details...

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