Toolchain build problems

Problems building eCos

Answers in this category:
Is there a list of known problems?
How should I report a problem?

Toolchain build problems specific to Linux/Unix hosts

Toolchain build problems specific to Windows hosts

Answers in this category:
General toolchain build problems
The assembler reports errors building libgcc
System requirements
I have problems building the SID simulator on cygwin

Answers in this category:
RPM package requirements
Toolchain build problems on other Unix systems
Build problems on Alpha systems
Build problems on Solaris systems

If you have installed only a minimal Linux system then some libraries may be missing. The most likely candidates are the ncurses and ncurses-devel packages, and it will be necessary to install these first. You must also have the glibc-devel package installed, although that is normally the case.

Officially Red Hat Linux is the only supported host Unix system for use with eCos, but in practice it is possible to build the tools on other systems as well. As on all systems care has to be taken care with the position of . in your PATH. In addition you will need to have a reasonable set of existing tools on your Unix machine before you can build a cross-compiler. A good starting point is the gcc compiler.

It has been reported that egcs-1.1.2 is not capable of building the eCos host-side tools (ecosconfig, etc.). Alpha users should use at least gcc 2.95.2 to compile these tools.

Two problems are occasionally encountered on Solaris systems. One of these relates to the admin command. Another involves termio although this is believed to be fixed in recent tools sources. Solutions to these problems are available via the mailing list archives.

Answers in this category:
Things that are NOT problems
Builds resulting in many syntax and parse errors
What if the patches fail to apply?
Insight 5.0 cannot display my source files, although gdb -nw works
I have Cygwin b20.1 and....
I'm using Windows 95/98 and...

Under windows, running the configure script will output:

    This configuration is not supported in the following directories:
      texinfo
    (Any other directories should still work fine.)

A common source of problems on Windows is that applying patches may inadvertently lead to CRLFs getting inserted into source files where they are not wanted. When applying the patches you should verify that the /tmp directory (or the directory specified by the TMPDIR, TMP or TEMP environment variables) is mounted in binary mode. If this is not the case the patches will apply, but the build will later fail. You may verify this using the Cygwin mount command. If /tmp is not explicitly listed, the entry for / will be used. If it says "textmode" for this entry, use the following command from a Cygwin bash prompt:

    mount -f -b c:/cygwin/tmp /tmp

You may need to substitute another path for c:/cygwin if Cygwin was installed to another directory.

If you already have a set of sources which may have CRLFs in, then you can use the following command from a cygwin prompt on affected files:

    tr -d '\r' < AFFECTEDFILE > foo
    mv foo AFFECTEDFILE

Some of the tools patches are against sources that are under continuous development, which may mean that the patches may no longer apply. Analyze the patch reject (.rej) files to determine if this is the case, and if so, send a message to the ecos-discuss mailing list.

If you get a message from the patch utility reporting that it cannot create a file C:\TEMP/xxxx where xxxx is some number, then this probably indicates that the environment variables TMP or TMPDIR have been set to a Windows-style location, such as C:\TEMP rather than a Cygwin-style location, such as /tmp. This may also cause other problems in future so it is highly recommended that you override this environment variable in the cygwin.bat startup file (located in the bin directory of the Cygwin installation) which is executed when the Start Menu is used to start a Cygwin bash shell. This may be done in cygwin.bat with a command such as:

    set TMP=/tmp

Alternatively, after invoking a bash shell, remember to issue the command:

    TMP=/tmp ; export TMP

or similar.

You need to apply a patch to the Insight TCL directory. Download the insight-tcl.pat patch to a file and apply it:

    cd /src/gdb/insight-5.0
    tr -d '\r' < insight-tcl.pat | patch -p0

You must now rebuild and reinstall Insight as described in the build instructions you originally used. It is safest to use a new empty build directory rather than reusing the Insight build directory from the previous build.

Cygwin b20.1 is now obsolete. While it may still be possible to get support on the cygwin and ecos-discuss lists when using this version of Cygwin, it is likely the initial recommended solution will be to upgrade your Cygwin installation to v1.3 or later.

Building the tools under Windows 95 or 98 is not supported. It may work, but it has proven unreliable in the past. It is recommended to use an Windows NT/2000/XP system instead for the initial toolchain build. On some Windows 95/98 machines it may be possible to get a working toolchain if you install the very latest version of cygwin and try hard enough, but there are no guarantees.

Always make sure that you follow the instructions exactly. A lot of the problems that get reported are caused by some apparently minor deviation from these instructions, but they still take time to track down. Take special care with the target triplets specified during the configure step.

One common problem is lack of disk space. Building a full toolchain requires a lot of disk space, especially on a FAT-based file system. If you come across a strange toolchain build failure then please check there is plenty of disk space available on all the relevant drives.

Toolchain builds will fail if you have . in your PATH before the native tools. Specifically, at some points during the build it will execute ./as rather than /usr/bin/as: since ./as will be e.g. a PowerPC assembler it will not be happy when the compiler invokes it with an ix86 intermediate file.

Make sure you have at least the estimated amount of disk space required in the toolchain build instructions to build and install the toolchain.

Some toolchains also need a lot of memory to build. If you have less than 64MB of memory free or only a small amount of swap space then you may run into problems, but a lot depends on what else is running on the system at the time.

Answers in this category:
My newly installed GCC reports "cpp: too many input files"
Multiply defined symbols when target is built twice

More recent gcc snapshots do not have this limitation, which is specific to gcc 2.95.2 or earlier. To resolve it, you can: use a more recent gcc snapshot; reconfigure gcc with the intended installation location set correctly; or set up symlinks from the old location to the new one.

There is a list of known problems and, in most cases, recommended workarounds. It is manually generated from our internal problem report database. Full external access to this problem report database is not currently available because of confidentiality issues.

***Update: The information there is partially obsolete. Please refer to the bug tracking system for details on known bugs.

The preferred approach is to use the problem reporting web page, which ensures that the report is in our database. Note that there are a number of commercial organisations who provide high quality eCos support, for a charge. You should choose this option if you need guaranteed turnaround and detailed replies.

Alternatively problems can be reported on the ecos-discuss mailing list. If you have already traced the problem yourself, it is better to create a patch and send it to the ecos-patches mailing list.

Minor problems which are unlikely to be of general interest, for example a spelling mistake on one of the web pages, can be sent to ecos-maintainers@sources.redhat.com.