Re: i486 Solaris 2.5 / embedded m68k cross compiler needed

["C. M. Heard/VVNET, Inc." <heard@vvnet.com>]

On Wed, 11 Feb 1998, Michael Skolones wrote, in response
to an earlier reply by Robert J. Brown:

>[rj:                                                                     ]
>[ If you are a VxWorks customer, they should be able to supply Gnu       ]
>[ toolchain -- cross compiler, assembler, run-time libraries, linker,    ]
>[ debugger, etc.  You could build them yourself, but Wind River supplies ]
>[ the Gnu tools routinely for their OS.  The trickiest part is the cross ]
>[ debugger, but they do that too.  I trust you are using some kind of    ]
>[ MVME board from Motorola, and that there is a BSP available for it.    ]
>
>      We are already up and running on the VME board (which is from PEP, not
>      Moto.  PEP supplied the BSP), using the PEP/Wind River-supplied tools
>      for a Sparc/Solaris 2.5 cross m68K PEP VME.  The problem is that we
>      need to do field support for some of our products, and we don't have a
>      portable Sparc.  We have a PC-based laptop running Solaris 2.5.  The
>      missing link is the i486/Solaris-m68K cross compiler.
>
>      I haven't called the folks at Wind River, but I've been told that they
>      don't currently support Solaris running on Intel hardware.

If Wind River supplies GNU tools hosted on Sparc Solaris and targeted for
the m68k/VxWorks environment you use, then one option that you have would
be to get the source for those tools and rehost them on x86 Solaris yourself
(Wind River is obliged under terms of the GPL to make the sources available
if they distribute the GNU tools at all).  One would expect that all required
target-specific patches should already be present in any source you get from
Wind River to build a working Sparc-hosted version;  if that is true, I would
expect that rehosting on x86 Solaris should go quite smoothly if you follow
the instructions carefully.  At least, that has been my experience in the past.
For example, I was able (with no prior experience) to build binutils-2.6 and
gcc-2.7.2 from the sources on the February 1996 GNU CDROM in about two days
for a MIPS target hosted on Solaris2.4_x86.  It took somewhat longer to get
gdb-4.16 up because I had to write my own target-resident gdb stub, but
in your case the analogous component should be available from Wind River.

Mike
--
C. M. Heard/VVNET, Inc.
heard@vvnet.com