Properly building newlib to install spec files

[Orlando Arias]

Greetings,

On 10/22/19 3:07 AM, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Dear Orlando,
> 
> On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 at 21:21, Orlando Arias wrote:
>>
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I was under the impression that the nosys.specs file was no longer provided for the msp430-elf target in light of the CIO interface being added [1][2]. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Orlando.
>>
>> [1] https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2015/msg00926.html
>> [2] https://sourceware.org/ml/newlib/2015/msg00923.html
> 
> In the meantime I figured out that I only had a link to an outdated
> (and probably removed) file on TI's web server, the site
>     http://software-dl.ti.com/msp430/msp430_public_sw/mcu/msp430/MSPGCC/latest/index_FDS.html
> still works and provides working links to a newer version of gcc, so I
> was able to proceed with testing msp430 as well.
> 
> After installing gcc 8.3.0 with newlib 2.4.0 (the ones for which they
> provide patches inside msp430-gcc-8.3.0.16-source-patches.tar.bz2) in
> the same way that got me the spec files installed for arm, those same
> spec files in fact seem to be missing for msp430-elf-gcc.
> 
> I don't quite remember where I got these instructions from. I was
> definitely following a few tutorials in the past to get me started
> with msp430 and some arm chips, but I'm not sure if the requirement to
> specify the spec file came from one of the tutorials for arm, or maybe
> random notes from internet about how to test msp430 when I tried to
> update the msp430 toolchain inside our package manager, like for
> example:
>     https://gist.github.com/0/631c9006a672458eaa48
> 
> Bottomline: I'm perfectly happy at the moment that I hopefully got the
> arm toolchain fixed (which was both reported by two of our users, plus
> me when I needed to do something with arm), while I'm not yet sure if
> I actually need it for msp430, and it's unlikely that I'll soon have
> time to play with msp430 boards again. In short: I'm probably happy
> until the next user complains. (I don't know much about
> cross-compilers or msp430, so I cannot argue whether the spec files
> need to be added back or not.)
> 
> Mojca
> 

Thank you for taking the time to look over this. I myself maintain the
[most of the] packages for the msp430-elf toolchain in the AUR [Arch
Linux User Repository]. I noted a while back that the nosys.specs file
was missing from the newlib package, tracing back to the patches I
pointed out in my earlier e-mail. That file did use to ship with newlib
for the msp430-elf target.

At the time, I had some users asking about what happened to the file in
question, but unfortunately the best I could tell them was that it was
removed, and gave them a different linker command to use in their
projects. That is, pass the linker -lnosys if necessary or provide own
implementations for the missing BSP functions, the latter of which
should generally be the course of action, given that -lnosys provides
the CIO routines which are mostly useless outside debugging [CIO,
Console I/O, implements something similar to ARM semihosting, adding
traps for the debugger to emulate certain operations]. I was wondering
if I had done something wrong.

I looked over the instructions in your GitHub link, and I noted that
they use newlib-2.2.0-1. Looking at the release directory [1] for
newlib, that particular release predates the patches that removed
nosys.specs from the distribution. That is why their linking command
seems to work. Otherwise, the procedure they outline is effectively the
same as the one I use in the packages I maintain.

Again, thank you.

Cheers,
Orlando.

[1] ftp://sourceware.org/pub/newlib/index.html

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