[patch] Altera Nios II support

Sandra Loosemore sandra@codesourcery.com
Fri Apr 19 19:29:00 GMT 2013


The attached patch adds minimal support for building newlib for Altera 
Nios II ELF (nios2-elf).  Altera did the initial toolchain port for this 
processor some years ago and now Mentor Graphics is helping to update 
the patches and get them in the upstream repositories.  The binutils 
patches were committed a couple of months ago and the gcc port has just 
been posted.  gdb will be posted soon and glibc (for nios2-linux-gnu 
target) will follow in due course.

For this target, we are not contributing a libgloss port, only newlib 
proper.  Most people developing code for bare-metal applications on Nios 
II will probably use a HAL BSP, which Altera's tools generate directly 
from the hardware description.  If the hardware description includes a 
serial interface, the HAL BSP implements the low-level system calls to 
make it work for console I/O, as well as providing all the necessary 
startup and initialization code.  In addition to testing with a HAL BSP, 
at Mentor we also have a BSP built using our own proprietary framework 
that supports semihosted I/O when used with an appropriate debug probe. 
  We re-used the same semihosting API as is implemented by the m68k 
libgloss port and we would recommend borrowing that code if there is 
future demand for a semihosted libgloss implementation on this target.

Besides running the newlib testsuite, we've also run the complete 
gcc/g++/libstdc++ and gdb testsuites using newlib on nios2-elf, so the 
newlib port has been well-tested overall.

I've elided the automatically-generated files from the attached patch to 
make it easier to review.  I also didn't include the aclocal.m4 file in 
the diff because it is an exact copy of the one from the mips directory. 
  Of course these files will be checked in with the rest of the patch 
per the ChangeLog, but I saw no point in asking maintainers to wade 
through the diffs when reviewing this patch.

OK to commit?

-Sandra

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