Need to regroup on a cross compiler!

["Thunder Scientific Corporation" <mike at ThunderScientific dot com>]

Hi, everyone.

Several comments have led me to reconsider my original crossgcc decisions.
What I want to do is to develop a stand-alone 486DX embedded controller for
a product we manufacture here.  We're considering a two board system, one
running Visual Basic to do all user I/O, all data logging, and supervise the
system as a master, plus an embedded 486DX PC/104 board running a compiled
"C" program to control a humidity chamber via PID loops.  The embedded
controlled is to communicate once a second with the master board via serial
data packets on dedicated COM ports.

So the idea here is to build embedded code using Newlib for run time
libraries, rather than GNU libc. Therefore I need a cross compiler to run in
my i686 linux host and produce object code for an i486 target.  So here are
two very relevant questions:

      1) What operating system should I select for my target?  All we really
need to do is load an image on bootup and then go.
      So can I build an a.out image if I select target=i486-aout?  Or do I
need to can a linux kernel in flash and then load an elf
      image at run-time?

      2) What documentation exists describing how to build a cross compiler
which will link executable object files with specified
      run time library files, such as those from Newlib.

      3) What else don't I know that should be intuitively obvious to the
GNU tools embedded developer audience?

And by the way, let me clear some confusion here - much as you folks have
helped me clear up mine.  First, I apologize for the outgoing name "Mike"
attached to my emails.  We are a very small company with only 6 email users,
and we all share one common email pool, with all incoming addresses aliased
there, and we then do all our email on one sole Windows95 machine, which
insists on tagging all outgoing mail as from "Mike", who is very senior
here.  If my PC (a triple-boot system) wasn't married to a Winmodem and I
wasn't restricted to dial-up networking I could use pine on Linux.

Enough personal trivia.  Thanks for your patience in reading this.

Help is actively solicited:  Please send me any comments (or maybe point me
to a FM to R!)

Richard Bowser
Engineer
Thunder Scientific Corporation

richardb@thunderscientific.com




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