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manual:demos:gcc_arm_embedded

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Upgrading from Codesourcery G++ Lite to the GCC ARM Embedded toolchain

Background

For several years Codesourcery (now Mentor Graphics) maintained and released the GCC for ARM compiler binaries, bundled with an easy to use installer, under the name Codesourcery G++ Lite. Unfortunately, their website now states that “Sourcery CodeBench Lite releases for ARM EABI, ARM GNU/Linux, ARM AARCH64-Linux, IA32/IA64 GNU/Linux and ELF are no longer available”.

Fortunately, the ARM organization itself is actively maintaining and enhancing the GCC compiler for the ARM architecture. At regular intervals they release pre-built binaries of the toolchain under the name GCC ARM Embedded.

Several OpenBLT demo programs that target microcontrollers with an ARM core, make use of the Codesourcery G++ Lite toolchain. You can still find a download link to a working version of the toolchain on the page that describes the demo specifics. However, is it recommended to switch to the GCC ARM Embedded toolchain.

This page describes how to upgrade from the Codesourcery G++ Lite to the GCC ARM Embedded toolchain, to the point that you can build the OpenBLT demo programs without any further changes.

Upgrade procedure

Step 1 - Uninstall Codesourcery G++ Lite

Open your Windows Explorer and browse to directory C:\Users\{username}\MentorGraphics\Sourcery_CodeBench_Lite_for_ARM_EABI\uninstall\ and double-click the program uninstall.exe.

Step 2 - Download and install GCC ARM Embedded

Visit the GCC ARM Embedded website and download the Windows installer. The filename is something like gcc-arm-none-eabi-5_3-2016q1-20160330-win32.exe, although the version number and release date in the filename might be different.

Starts the installation by double-clicking the file you just downloaded. You can use all the default settings of the installer, except on the last screen. Here you need to check the checkbox Add path to environmental variable, as can be seen in the following illustration:

At the end of the installation, the readme-file is shown and a command prompt window is opened. Both can be closed.

Step 3 - Download and install make and rm

The build environment of the OpenBLT demo programs, which are configured for Codesourcery G++ Lite, rely on the utilities GNU make and rm that automatically get installed with Codesourcery G++ Lite. Now that these utilities are no longer on your computer, they should be downloaded and installed again.

Download the utilities by following thes link gnu_build_tools_win32.zip. Once download, unpack the zip-archive and copy all unpacked files to the .\bin directory of where GCC ARM Embedded was installed. It will be a directory similar to C:\Program Files\GNU Tools ARM Embedded\5.3 2016q1\bin.

This completes the upgrade procedure. Refer back to the page that describes the specifics of the OpenBLT demo programs and follow the instructions for building the bootloader and demo user program.

manual/demos/gcc_arm_embedded.1462042685.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/09/24 22:13 (external edit)