Hello all, esp. Dave and Mike,
sorry to bother you again. To begin with, I apologise for my incomplete or ambiguous question. I would like to represent my problem with better clarity.
Our company (a hardware company) has given a contract to another company to port gcc onto its proprietory processor. The porting company issued a contract in which it mentioned everything (all porting work) as 'NON-OS DEPENDENT FUNCTIONALITY ONLY' (which they call as 'Free-Standing Implementation'). (First, Im confused if Non-OS Dependent Functionality and Free-Standing are one and the same?). Finally, they have delivered a port that consisted of gcc, gdb, gas, binutils, glibc and newlib. But the functionlity is very limited, meaning we could not do anything like malloc, printf, strcat, sin, cos, etc. They say that all this is NOT supported in their Free-Standing implementation (which they have penned down as Non OS Dependent port). So, were we cheated? I think so because a port of newlib should mean we can use printf (atleast a stub has to be there). But I need confirmation on this issue.
Here is what I understand by the free-standing implementation of gcc:
It is a port of gcc using which you can build a OS kernel. It includes only 4 headers namely <float.h>, <stdarg.h>,<limits.h>,<stddef.h> (excluding Amd 1 and C99 standards).
But, I did not understand what is included in glibc and newlib that constitutes the Non-OS Dependent functionality. Can anyone elaborate on it?
Hope Im clearer this time,
Thank you and kind regards, Sriharsha.
Mike Stump wrote:
On Apr 26, 2005, at 4:37 AM, Sriharsha Vedurmudi wrote:
I want to know what is to be expected
This is a bizarre question. I just bought a new car, and I want to know what to know what I should expect out of it. A new car.
For newlib, you should expect newlib, for glibc, you should expect glibc, for gcc, you should expect gcc, but this I am sure doesn't help you.
There are far too many features and complexities of these software packages to describe them in an email to you fully.
For example, you can expect:
int i = 42;
to compile, and produce code that allocates a variable named i, and sets the value to 42.
Further, you can expect that if someone paid your porting company to do a simulator for your arch, that you can load and run hello world in gdb. I don't know if this was done, so, in part, what is expected, is either known to you because it was in a contract, or sold to you, and should be in the documentation.
There are about a million other things to expect, I'll leave them all out, as the question cannot be answered fully.
You can ask your tools what you can expect, by doing things like:
main() { printf("Hi %d\n", 42); }
and seeing if that drags in printf. Chances are it will, then, you can expect it to work.
You can look at the include directory directly, and you can expect that you can #inlcude any file listed there, again, ask the computer, not us. You can look at the prototypes in those headers, and you can expect to call any of them. You can do an nm of all the .o and .a files, and you can expect that any symbol defined, you can use in some way.
Also, gcc is the wrong list, please use gcc-help instead.
