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Build a toolchain for ARM with cygwin 1.5.25-15 ?


Dear all,

IÂ am trying to set up a toolchain for an ARM platform
(arm-linux-gnueabi, my TV) using cygwin, without much success so far.
The tools I'm using are:

binutilsÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ 20080624-2
gcc4ÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂÂ 4.3.2-2

The toolchain code consists of:

gcc 4.2.0, glibc 2.5.90, binutils 2.17.50, linux kernel 2.6.18, rather
heavily patched for the target processor.

building the toolchain is done in 4 steps:

1 build binutils,
2 build gcc stage 1, a barebones gcc, for building glibc
3 build glibc
4 build gcc stage 2, with c and c++ support.

Things go wrong in step 3, the linker starts complaining about
undefined references, all referring to weak symbols( __open and a
bunch of others ).
After some digging I found some mention about cygwin not supporting
weak symbols in its executable format.
Obviously, the cygwin versions of gas and ld should support weak
symbols when compiling for arm-linux-gnueabi, before my plan of
building this toolchain will succeed.
What I don't see is why the host platform has to support weak symbols
(in PE-dll's) before the compiler/linker for the target platform can
use them as well.
So I started searching the web again for this and ended up in this
mailing list, where recently there was some mention of weak symbols
not being fully supported by cygwin, but work on it is ongoing.

This leads me to the following questions:

If I upgrade cygwin to a newer (beta) version (1.7.x), is weak symbol
support by the binutils of that version better/good enough?
If not, is there some activity on the solution of this issue?
Else, if I install a compiled version of glibc for the target
processor (built on another platform), then build gcc stage 2, could
that be useful and lead to a working toolchain?
After all, I don't care having a statically compiled toolchain, as
long as it is capable of building shared (ELF) libraries etc. for
another platform.
or should I abandon my plan altogether, maybe because weak symbol
support is not considered to be present in the foreseeable future?

Thanks in advance,


marcel

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