[svlug] newer arm bare metal toolchain on Debian

[Ivan Sergio Borgonovo]

On 05/25/2016 02:44 AM, Marco Walther wrote:

>> The most promising for STM32F1 seems to be :
>> arm-bare_newlib_cortex_m3_nommu-eabi
>> arm-unknown-eabi
> I used the tools for the Robotis OpenCM9.04 a bit and they seem to work
> ok for what I tried.

> http://support.robotis.com/en/product/auxdevice/controller/opencm9.04.htm.
> The mcu is a 32bit Cortex-M3 STM32F103CB, the tools are basically a
> combination of the Arduino IDE with an ARM gcc ..., I don't know how
> close that gets you, but maybe you want to look around there.
>
> Overall, the Arduino world is integrating different `lower power' ARM
> boards;-)

Actually I've already reasonably complicated stuff that works on STM32F1 
using the toolchain I've found in debian.

I doubt such an high level project spent time preparing their own C/C++ 
toolchan.

Sometimes I'm quite surprised of how things end up in software development.

I've to admit I'm speculating based on my prejudices.
I think it is an order of magnitude more complex building a toolchain on 
Windows rather than on Linux, let alone building a "sysroot".
But on Windows you just download an auto installing binary, on linux 
you've to worry about i32 libraries on a amd64 host, install ncurses 
dependency, pick up one of the many "toolchain" build system...

An yet while it should be much easier to build a toolchain on Linux none 
of the project found the time to get more polished and documented.
It's like "you're using this tool, you'd know, deal with it".

On Windows it is more like "you surely don't know, you're not willing to 
waste time and you're a large userbase, so we are going to help you".

I'm happy enough I've been able to avoid the "vendor IDE" and use stock 
components on Linux to consolidate my development workflow but having 
"messed up, hard to maintain toolchain" may become an issue.

But maybe everything is simpler than it seems to me right now and I'll 
be enlightened later as it happens sometimes.

-- 
Ivan Sergio Borgonovo
http://www.webthatworks.it