On Tue, 2 May 2000 Chris.Smith@raytheon.co.uk wrote:

> Brilliant - that answers all my Q's.  Note:  I am enthusiastic - but not
> that much :)  BBBB works ok, so I think I'll live with the supervisor
> restarts.

So can I, which is why I've not done it yet.

> ** > [for Ben >> Can we have a serial console for development? :) ]
> **
> ** Well, I can probably do it for Archimedes-class machines (which use
> ** 6551s), but I haven't got an IOEB machine (which use 16450-clones), so
> ** testing it there is a little harder.
> 
> Okay - understood.  I had a feeling that the A5k was going to be a pig
> on this.  They magically decided to drop the proprietry arc hardware in
> favour of more PC-like stuff.  How hard do you think it'd be to import
> a serial driver from somewhere else and attach it (the hard bit)?

Shouldn't be too much pain, but I'm not doing it without the hardware in
front of me.  I'll try to get a serial console going on old hardware
sometime soon, anyway.

> Any views on cross-compiling yet?

Well, I've built my new cross kit twice now, without too much pain.  You want
<URL:http://cvs.tartarus.org/netbsd-arm26/sys/arch/arm26/patches/gcc-2.95.2.diff>, 
a copy of gcc-core-2.95.2 and a copy of binutils-000413.  Build binutils
with --target=arm-acorn-elf, build gcc with --target=armv2-acorn-netbsd
and hope.  I have $prefix/arm-acorn-elf a symlink to
$prefix/armv2-acorn-netbsd, and a load of symlinks from
/usr/local/bin/arm26cc etc to the relevant utilities, then a script called
"arm26make" that tries to set all the variables correctly and then run
make.  Erm, that's not very clear, is it?

One important thing is that setting the path to include
$prefix/armv2-acorn-netbsd/bin isn't a good idea, since then the Makefiles
can't get at the host C compiler.  Set variables like CC instead.  Oh, and
some variables need to be set in make variables and some (like STRIP) need
to be in the environment.  I'll post arm26make here when I get a chance,
since it does most of the magic.

Oh, and gcc-2.95.2 doesn't support a NetBSD/powerpc host out of the box,
so you need to grab the patches from the NetBSD source tree if you're
doing that (I am).

... and you can get binutils snapshots from ftp://sourceware.cygnus.com/.

... and I should get back to work.

-- 
Ben Harris
Unix Support, University of Cambridge Computing Service.