🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings,
For the past few weeks I've been going through a frustrating time trying to 
build a GNU cross compiler for a 68K embedded system.  This has prompted
me to make a suggestion:

Could GNU build into the configuration scripts for GCC, GAS and Binutils
explicit support for embedded systems?  Embedded systems being defined
as a machine with no operating system where code is to be compiled to
an absolute or position idependant code module.

A very SIMPLE library could be supplied that allows basic stdio functions
to work through a user supplied read/write serial port routine.  That is,
no file support, nothing OS-dependant, just enough code to allow printf
to operate if the user can supply the serial port routines.

The configure scripts for GCC, GAS and Binutils could then be setup to
support a -TARGET=*-embedded specification.

The intent of this is to allow people like me who want to build a 68K
embedded cross compiler to do something like this:

configure -HOST=i486-unknown-linux -TARGET=m68k-embedded

In the GCC, GAS and BinUtils directories and get out a set of tools
which we know wouldn't compile in any operating system references
and would need only a trivial set of library routines (character in
and character out) to work.

Since the target is known to be embedded it should be pretty easy to 
supply all the required .h files (since all the complex calls like
ioctl would do nothing) leaving the user to write an initialization,
startup, character in/out routine and exit(0) routine.

I'm hoping someone will take this request seriously as I keep seeing
requests for help making embedded cross compilers (including my
calls for help) which never seem to get answered.  GNU can't be expected
to have config support cross compiling to every OS in the world but
support for building a cross to an embedded CPU would be so simple to 
add it seems like a shame not to have it.  Particularly when so many
people are interested in it.

Right now other cross-compilers are either terriblly expensive ($5000-
$10000) for a good one or cheap but (generally) crappy code generators.
GCC is just what I want but I can't seem to get through the maze of
compiling it as a Cross.

By the way...so far I am very impressed by the ease of building a NON 
cross compiler version of GCC, if only the embedded cross was as simple!

Greg Corson
milo@mcs.com