[U-Boot] [PATCH] tools/os_support: add OS X Lion support

[Andreas Bießmann]

Dear Andy Fleming,

Am 25.11.2011 um 20:29 schrieb Andy Fleming:

> I've been trying to get the compiler to run on Mac OS X for a bit, but
> haven't managed to get it to build (let alone get U-Boot to build).

Well building sandbox will (currently) not work. But having a (self compiled) GNU cross toolchain for some architecture you can build u-boot for boards with that arch. I've tested some arm devices and can successfully build u-boot for at91rm9200ek, at91sam9260ek, dockstar and devkit8000 on my OS X box (since 10.5). Last upgrade to 10.7 broke the mentioned getline() in tools.

> Any chance you could send me some pointers to how you got one up and
> running?

Getting a cross toolchain running on OS X is (nearly) the same effort than using a linux box as host system. You need to get the tools for building the toolchain, the sources for the toolchain itself and some receipts to build it.
I use fink [1] to get the base system (gnu coreutils, flex/bison, awk, sed, …) and then build my toolchain from scratch with some self built makefiles (I could provide them but they are rather outdated). You can also use macports [2], AFAIK they have some ports for at least gnu arm cross chains.

If you like to build your toolchain for your own I recommend reading some about 'How to build a cross toolchain'. Dan Kegel's (outdated) 'Building and Testing gcc toolchain' [3] has some pointers for OS X as host system and is in general a good starting point for toolchain building. LFS [4] has some general pointers about building a toolchain from scratch and CLFS [5] considers special cases for cross compilation.
Another starting point could be crosstool-ng [6], ELDK [7], buildroot [8] and a lot of other collections of receipts to build your toolchain (note I have used none of them on OS X but it may work).
I'm currently trying to get pengutronix ptxdist [9] working on OS X to build my toolchain with that tool (OSELAS toolchain [10]). We use these toolchain at work, using it at home too would be great.

I hope I could answer your question, if not feel free to ask ...

best regards

Andreas Bießmann

[1] http://www.finkproject.org/
[2] http://www.macports.org/
[3] http://kegel.com/crosstool/crosstool-0.43/doc/crosstool-howto.html
[4] http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
[5] http://trac.cross-lfs.org/
[6] http://crosstool-ng.org/
[7] http://www.denx.de/wiki/DULG/ELDK
[8] http://buildroot.uclibc.org/
[9] http://ptxdist.org/software/ptxdist/index_en.html
[10] http://www.ptxdist.org/oselas/toolchain/index_en.html