Skip to content

Cross Compiler

Assembling or compiling a test program for this model needs a cross-toolchain: tools that run on your host but produce SPARC V8 binaries. Rather than requiring you to build one yourself just to try the bundled example, a prebuilt release ships with this repository.

A prebuilt, 32-bit x86 (i386) sparc-elf toolchain, bundled as a release:

  • sparc-elf-as, the assembler.
  • sparc-elf-ld, the linker.
  • sparc-elf-gcc (GCC 4.4.3), a minimal freestanding C compiler.
  • objdump, readelf.

See Installation step 5 to install it.

It exists for one narrow purpose: building this project's own validation/asm/ and validation/C/ tests, with no setup beyond installing the bundled release. Two scripts, compiler/assemble.sh and compiler/compile_c.sh, drive it to build this project's own test programs, see Writing and Running Assembly Programs and Writing and Running C Programs. See compiler/README.md for exactly what's bundled and why.

Building your own, instead

If you want to write more serious programs of your own, rather than just work with this project's own test suite, build a proper, modern, actively-supported cross-compiler instead, with Buildroot:

# download and extract Buildroot, then:
make qemu_sparc_ss10_defconfig && make menuconfig
# under "Toolchain", enable "Build cross gdb for the host" if you want a
# cross gdb, for debugging a *target* SPARC binary running under, say,
# QEMU. Unrelated to this repo's own gdb support (see "Examining Core
# State at Runtime Using GDB"), which uses the *host's* own gdb directly
# on the host-native simulator process. No cross gdb needed for that.
make      # downloads and builds everything, takes a while

The resulting tools (sparc-linux-gcc, sparc-linux-as, ...) end up in <buildroot>/output/host/usr/bin. Add that to your PATH. See compiler/README.md for the full note, including a link to the original writeup this is based on.