Cross compiling

Have you ever tried to build a cross compiler under cygwin? Today I tried to do exactly this. Well I quite underestimate the complexity. After all many Unix programs can be happily compiled without much effort under cygwin, why gcc should be different?A cross-compiler is somewhat convoluted, in fact you have first to build a bootstrapping version of the compiler in order to compile the standard C library. Before compiling the compiler you need the binary tools compiled for the intended target. The library needs some information from the operating system. Since my goal was to produce a cross compiler for embedded Linux running on ARM 9, I had to do something with the Linux kernel.
When you successfully compiled the compiler and the library, you have to compile the final compiler.
Luckily today there is internet and google ready to help you. I found many pages and advices, but I haven’t yet achieved my goal. Moreover it is not clear to me whether the cross compiler supports by default all instruction mode that an ARM920 makes available – native, thumb and jazelle. More on this in the next days.

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