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gcc-toolchain-builder: Basic scripts for building a RISC-V GCC compiler toolchain

Overview

This directory contains basic scripts for building local instances of CORE-V GCC toolchains. The scripts provide the means of fetching the source code and building the executables and libraries for well-defined toolchain configurations. The intention is to simplify the processs of building such toolchains and make it as "push-button" (and as accessible to CORE-V users) as reasonably possible.

Currently, the scripts support only 'bare metal' toolchain configurations intended for hardware verification of 32- and 64-bit RISC-V targets. These configurations are deliberately lightweight and consist of:

  • binutils-gdb: assembler, linker, GDB debugger, and object file utilities
  • GCC: the GNU GCC compiler configured for C only
  • newlib: an open-source C library suitable for embedded applications.

Prerequisites

Disk space: Approximately 3.5 GB of disk space are needed to build and install a bare-metal toolchain from source code:

  • 1.9 GB is occupied by source code (including Git history);
  • 1.1 GB is needed for the build space;
  • 0.5 GB is needed for the installed toolchain.

Several standard packages are needed to build the GCC-based compiler toolchains. On Debian/Ubuntu, executing the following command should suffice:

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf automake autotools-dev curl git libmpc-dev libmpfr-dev libgmp-dev gawk build-essential bison flex texinfo gperf libtool bc zlib1g-dev

On Fedora/CentOS/RHEL OS, executing the following command should suffice:

$ sudo yum install autoconf automake git libmpc-devel mpfr-devel gmp-devel gawk  bison flex texinfo gcc gcc-c++ zlib-devel

On macOS, you can use Homebrew to install the dependencies:

$ brew install gawk gnu-sed gmp mpfr libmpc isl zlib

Getting started

Once the prerequisites (see above) are satisfied, you can fetch and build the upstream GCC toolchain (default: 13.1.0) for bare-metal 32-bit and 64-bit applications in just three steps.

# 1. Select an installation location for the toolchain (here: the default RISC-V tooling directory $RISCV).
INSTALL_DIR=$RISCV

# 2. Fetch the source code of the toolchain (assumes Internet access.)
sh get-toolchain.sh

# 3. Build and install the toolchain (requires write+create permissions for $INSTALL_DIR.)
You can set 
sh build-toolchain.sh $INSTALL_DIR

File and directory structure

The base infrastructure for building compilation toolchains consists of two scripts and a directory holding configuration files:

  • get-toolchain.sh: script in charge of obtaining the source code and extracting the correct code baselines.
  • build-toolchain.sh: script in charge of building and installing the different toolchain components in suitable order.
  • config/: directory containing the configuration files for the various configurations.

In the process of building the toolchain, two new directory trees are created under the current working directory:

  • src/: Source code is fetched and checked out into subdirectories of src in the current working directory.

  • build/: The building of the various components of the toolchain occurs in subdirectories of build in the current working directory.

This directory structure was chosen to keep the source and build directories local to the user's workspace while supporting systematic out-of-source-tree building of toolchain components.

Building a bare-metal toolchain (Newlib-based)

In order to build a toolchain you need to select a toolchain configuration and an installation location (an "install prefix"):

  • the toolchain configuration name must match one of the predefined config/CONFIG_NAME.sh files under config directory.

  • the installation location can be an arbitrary path. It needs not to exist yet: any missing directories will be created during the building process. The user running the build-toolchain.sh script must have sufficient permissions to create the missing directories of the installation location.

Once a configuration name CONFIG_NAME and an installation location INSTALL_LOCATION are chosen, use

sh get-toolchain.sh CONFIG_NAME
# E.g.,
# sh get-toolchain.sh gcc-10.2.0-baremetal

to fetch/update the source code and to check out the matching baseline of code.

If the name of the toolchain configuration is omitted, a default configuration will be selected implicitly. The default configuration is currently named gcc-13.1.0-baremetal and builds a toolchain containing

  • binutils v2.40 (official release baseline)
  • gcc v.13.1.0 (official release baseline)
  • newlib v4.3 (official release baseline).

To build the toolchain from the retrieved source baseline, use

sh build-toolchain.sh CONFIG_NAME INSTALL_DIR
# E.g.,
# sh build-toolchain.sh gcc-13.1.0-baremetal $RISCV

The build-toolchain.sh script incorporates fallbacks for several commonly encountered configuration and build issues. However, it is not meant to auto-detect major reconfigurations of source code such as a change of baseline configuration. Whenever the source configuration is changed, please use the -f (or --force) option to forcibly rebuild the entire toolchain:

sh build-toolchain.sh -f CONFIG_NAME INSTALL_DIR
# E.g.,
# sh build-toolchain.sh -f gcc-13.1.0-baremetal $RISCV

Defining new configurations

Users involved with toolchain validation and development may be interested in creating new configurations that cater for specific needs:

  • use of local Git mirrors to enable toolchain development and to shorten Git query times
  • building of experimental toolchains combining specific versions of individual components.

New configurations can be easily introduced by copying existing configuration files in subdirectory config/ under a different name and adjusting the values of per-component variables. Taking GCC as an example:

  • GCC_DIR defines the location of GCC source code.

  • GCC_REPO selects the Git repository to fetch GCC code from.

  • GCC_COMMIT identifies the revision of source code to use: a specific commit, tag, or branch.
    NOTE: If you set GCC_COMMIT to the name of a branch, the get-toolchain.sh will update the local repository to the tip of the remote branch at every invocation.

  • GCC_CONFIGURE_OPTS is the list of options to pass to the configure script.
    NOTE: Since GCC_CONFIGURE_OPTS is a Bourne shell variable, any double-quotes in the option list must be duly escaped to be correctly handled by the shell.

Potential additions

Several extensions are envisioned:

  • Explicit selection of GDB version
  • Addition of LLVM/Clang compilers
  • Support for Linux-based target environments
  • Addition of full-featured C library implementations