Chapter 1. Notation and conventions

Table of Contents
GDB and GCC command notation
Directory and file system conventions

Since the eCos development environment can run on both Windows and UNIX, and since there are six supported target architectures (MN10300, TX39, PowerPC, SPARClite, ARM7 and i386), notation conventions will be used to avoid repeating instructions which are very similar to each other.

GDB and GCC command notation

Cross-development commands like gcc and gdb will be shown prefixed with information about the platform for which you are cross-compiling.

For example, gcc for the MN10300 is invoked as mn10300-elf-gcc; for the TX39, gcc is invoked as mips-tx39-elf-gcc; for the PowerPC it is powerpc-eabi-gcc; for the SPARClite it is sparclite-elf-gcc; for the ARM7 it is arm-elf-gcc; and for the i386 it is i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc.

The same is true for gdb: the commands are mn10300-elf-gdb, mips-tx39-elf-gdb, powerpc-eabi-gdb, sparclite-elf-gdb, arm-elf-gdb, and i686-pc-linux-gnu-gdb.

When you see examples that invoke gcc and gdb you should remember to add the appropriate prefix for the architecture you are using.

The GCC cross compiler generates executable files with the .exe suffix on Windows, but not on UNIX. The suffix .exe will be omitted from executable file names, so you will see hello instead of hello.exe.