Re: crosstool vs. building from scratch

[Grant Likely <grant dot likely at secretlab dot ca>]

On 9-Feb-06, at 2:07 PM, Trevor Harmon wrote:

> I am reading Karim Yaghmour's book, "Building Embedded Linux  
> Systems," and in Chapter 4 he goes into great detail about building  
> a cross-compiling GCC toolchain from scratch. He describes how to  
> download and compile GCC, binutils, and kernel headers in separate  
> steps.
>
> In the same year of the book's publication, a set of scripts and  
> templates called crosstool [1] was released. It automates the  
> entire process of Yaghmour's Chapter 4 down to a single command  
> (more or less). I have used crosstool successfully for building  
> PowerPC executables on an x86 host.
>
> Because I'm new to cross-compiling, I'm curious about the  
> differences between these two techniques. I've never tried the from- 
> scratch method, but my assumption is that as long as crosstool can  
> build the toolchain successfully, then there's no reason to do  
> anything from scratch.
>
> Is this assumption correct, or are there developers who can use  
> crosstool but still prefer the from-scratch method (for more  
> flexibility, for instance)? In other words, if crosstool is working  
> for me, is there any situation where I would still want to build  
> the toolchain from scratch?

Unless you want to learn something about how a toolchain is put  
together, just use crosstool.  I started with scratch-built tool  
chains, then switched to crosstool because I've got better things to  
do with my time.

g.


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