Cygnus and GNUPro Toolkit fundamentals
The
following documentation introduces the fundamentals of the GNUPro tools.
Cygnus is the leading provider of single-source, UNIX, and NT desktop and cross-platform development tools for 32- and 64-bit microcontrollers. Cygnus provides GNUPro Toolkit as a set of powerful, multi-platform software development tools for advanced desktop and embedded systems. For more details, see What's in this package.
Cygnus is the leading provider of single-source, UNIX, and NT desktop and cross-platform development tools for 32- and 64-bit microcontrollers. Cygnus provides GNUPro Toolkit as a set of powerful, multi-platform software development tools for advanced desktop and embedded systems. For more details, see What's in this package.
For information on what's supported, see the following documentation.
- To install for the UNIX platforms, see Installing on Unix Systems from CD.
- To install for the Windows platforms, see Installing on Win 95/NT systems from CD.
About Cygnus
Cygnus was founded as a company in 1989
to provide commercial support for open Internet technologies. Having established
a support model for the GNU standard, leveraging the contributions of the
net community and the requirements of the semiconductor industry, Cygnus
has produced a powerful multi-platform software development toolkit. Its
changes and improvements are returned to the net community with assoxciations
to the Free Software Foundation, while the Cygnus implementation of the
these tools is sold and supported directly by Cygnus. Driven by a unique
business model, a consistent profitability and solid financial position
have enabled rapid expansion of operations to support the growing needs
of a loyal customer base.
Global in both operations and customer
set, Cygnus has its headquarters in Sunnyvale, California, with additional
offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia in the United
States; international offices are in Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada,
and Germany. With historical roots and current strong ties with the Internet
community, Cygnus leverages the global power of the Internet to drive innovation
and recruits new engineers for broadening resources.
Cygnus also benefits from advances in all of the related technologies that make end-user solutions more cost-effective and drive end-user demand. These technologies include storage ( disk, flash, DRAM), display (LCD), Internet and communication protocols, and wireless connectivity. Collectively, advances in these technologies allow ever-greater embedding of intelligence in traditional embedded systems (telecommunications equipment, automobiles, office equipment), and enable completely new classes of computing devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs).
One thing is certain: software tools and software content for them must keep pace in order to realize the promise of powerful, distributed, and densely interconnected computing power. The Cygnus mission is to enable this vision of "pervasive computing" through software solutions.
Cygnus doesn't deliver technology for technology's
sake. Our clients turn to us to create flexibility (with single-source
solutions providing true multi-platform capabilities and easy retargeting),
to shorten time-to-market (starting software development before hardware
is ready), and to reduce costs (providing cost-effective support services
and redistributable solutions).
These are the reasons that the best names in the business choose Cygnus.
The company strategy is to continue to extend the functionality and performance of the development tools, as well as to deliver innovative software component technologies for use in embedded systems. Customers include the world's top microcontroller companies as well as leading telecommunications software, game console, consumer electronics, and office equipment companies.
The world's leading product manufacturers choose the GNUPro toolkit for these benefits:
- Multi-platform capabilities from a single source base to quickly port code
- Knowledgeable support for keeping design teams productive and on-schedule
- Superior software engineering, incorporating leading-edge features and code optimizations
- Early availability of tools for a wide range of processors
- Stringent testing to insure solid, stable tools for fast development
- Custom enhancements to decrease time to market
Cygnus offers
contract engineering services to address a focused set of business problems,
offering these services primarily through our Silicon Partners program,
working directly with leading microcontroller companies to port GNUPro
technology to the latest microcontroller architectures and targeted optimizations.
Silicon Partners choose Cygnus because of the following reasons:
- Shortening time to market by delivering software tools in parallel with hardware development
- Having GNU compatibility, driving acceptance in the marketplace since GNU tools dominate the installed base of potential users, and since the single-source solution helps reduce customer risk
- Providing joint marketing services
- Offering access to advanced technologies such as NetTarget (which allows remote evaluation of hardware and software over the Internet)
- Commiting to solid, professional engineering services under firm, fixed-price contracts
GNUPro Toolkit includes a C/C++ compiler, a powerful source-level debugger with a graphical user interface, an assembler, a linker/loader, binary file utilities, and libraries. Complete source code, tested binaries, and product documentation accompany the tools. Not all tools are available for all platforms and operating systems. See Embedded cross-configuration support for specific information on your system. See What's in this package for information about the tools.
To locate specific documentation, see GNUPro Toolkit documentation and, also, see the following topics.
GNUPro software delivers productivity, flexibility, performance and portability with its ISO-conforming C and ISO-tracking C++ compiler, macro-assembler, GUI debugger, binary utilities and libraries.
See GNUPro Toolkit documentation for the discussion to which the following documentation refers for GNUPro Toolkit components.
Compilers and development tools
The following tools are the main tools
for developing with GNUPro Toolkit.
|
Debugger
graphical user interface, a visual debugger known as Cygnus Insight
TM (formerly known as GDBTk); see Working
with Cygnus Insight, the visual debugger.
|
Libraries
See GNUPro Libraries for
documentation regarding these libraries.
| libm | C math subroutine library ( only available for cross-development) |
| libio | C++ iostreams library |
| libstdc++ | C++ class library |
Binary utilities
See GNUPro Utilities for
documentation for the following utilities.
| addr2line | Translates program addresses into file names and line numbers |
| windres | Manipulates Windows resources |
General utilities
See GNUPro Utilities and
GNUPro Compiler Tools and the online documentation for clarification
regarding the following utilities.
GNUPro Toolkit documentation
GNUPro Toolkit includes documentation in
three forms.
- Printed
- HTML
- Online
Available by request.
To locate the documentation on the web, see http://www.cygnus.com/pubs/gnupro
See Using online documentation, Reading online documentation and Using info.
Documentation conventions
The
documentation uses the following conventions for commands, filenames, and
other program-specific subjects.
- Typewriter-text for input
- Typewriter-text in bold for output
- Typewriter-text in italics for variables
Indicates onscreen text as an example of input for a program, such as PATH=/usr/cygnus . It will also indicate other literal bits of text from a program, such as filenames or source code.
Indicates text that is an example of a program's onscreen output such as % or (gdb) as command prompt.
IMPORTANT!
% indicates a command
prompt in most documentation; a command prompt in some rare examples, depending
on the system in use and the program's tool, may actually be #
or $ and, as with the visual debugger, Cygnus Insight,
the command prompt is (gdb).
Indicates text that stands for variable input such as filename where the actual input might be a file with the name, foobar.c . For instance, the documentation may read "To delete the file named filename , type rm filename ." filename stands for the file you want to substitute, according to its name.
GNUPro Toolkit documentation includes the following documentation.
- Getting Started with GNUPro Toolkit
- Installation
- Introduction
- GNUPro Compiler Tools
- GNUPro Debugging Tools
- GNUPro Libraries
- GNUPro Utilities
- Using as (the GNU Assembler)
- Using ld (the GNU Linker)
- Using binutils (the GNU binary utilities)
- Using make (the GNU reconfiguring tool)
- Using info (GNU online help; not to be confused with HTML)
- Using diff & patch (GNU tools for comparing & merging files)
- GNUPro Tools for Embedded Systems
(detailing usage of the GNU tools and embedded target development)
See also Using
website documentation.
Using online documentation
For online
use, the accompanying software includes online versions of the following
documentation. This is not to be confused with the HTML versions.
You have the
freedom to copy the documentation using its accompanying copyright statements,
which include the necessary permissions.
See Using info in GNUPro Utilities for documentation regarding the following tools.
* Requires TEX, the technical documentation formatting tool
See also Reading
online documentation.
Reading online documentation
You can browse through the online
documentation using either Emacs or the info
documentation browser program, included in the GNUPro Toolkit. Online,
the information is organized into nodes, corresponding to the sections
of a printed book.
You can follow them in sequence, as in the printed books, or, using the hyperlinks, find the node that has the information you need. info has hot references; if one section refers to another section, you can have info take you immediately to that other section--and you can get back again easily to take up your reading where you had been. Naturally, you can also search for particular words or phrases.
The best way to get started with the online documentation system is to run the browser, info. After installing GNUPro Toolkit, you can get into info by just typing its name at your shell prompt (shown as % by the following example)--no options or arguments are necessary.
You may need
to check that info is in your shell path after you install GNUPro
Toolkit. If you have problems running info , contact your system
administrator.
To learn how to use info , type h for a programmed instruction sequence, or Ctrl-h for a short summary of commands.
If at any time you are ready to stop using info , type q.
See Using info in GNUPro Utilities for detailed discussion of the info program.
Using website documentation
As with all
GNU software, the HTML source for documentation is available (or
you can convert it yourself using publicly available utilities) if you
wish to put them into an internal Web server.
Native configurations support
GNUPro Toolkit software supports the following
native configurations.
| DEC Alpha Digital UNIX 4.0 |
| HP 9000/700 HP-UX 10.01/10.10/10.20 |
| IBM RS/6000 AIX 3.2.5/4.1.4 |
| IBM PowerPC AIX 4.1.4/4.2 |
| Linux RedHat 5.1 (i486) |
| SGI Iris 5.3/6.2 |
| Sun SPARC Solaris 2.5.1/2.6 |
| Sun SPARC SunOS 4.1.4 |
| Windows NT4.0-sp3/95-osr2 * |
Embedded cross-configuration support
GNUPro Toolkit
software supports the embedded cross-configurations as detailed in Embedded
cross-configurations supported.
|
HP-UX 10.x
|
PowerPC
|
ELF (EABI)
|
| MIPS 64 VR5xxx | ELF | |
| SGI Irix 5.3/6.2 | SH | COFF |
| SPARC Solaris 2.5.1 | ARM 7/7T | COFF |
| H8/300, H8/300H, H8S | COFF | |
|
a.out,
COFF, ELF *
|
||
| MIPS VR5xxx | ELF | |
| MIPS LSI TinyRISC | ELF | |
| MIPS TX39 | ELF | |
| SPARC | ELF | |
| SPARClet | a.out | |
| V85x | ELF | |
| x86 | COFF, ELF | |
| SPARC SunOS 4.1.4 | D10V | ELF |
| i960 | COFF | |
| M68K | a.out, COFF | |
| MIPS VR4100 | ELF | |
| MIPS VR4300 | ELF | |
| MIPS VR5xxx | ELF | |
| MIPS LSI TinyRISC | ELF | |
| MIPS TX39 | ELF | |
| PowerPC | EABI | |
| SH | COFF | |
| SPARC (MicroSPARC) | ELF | |
| V85x | ELF | |
| x86 | COFF | |
| Windows NT4.0/95 ** | ARM 7/7T | COFF |
| D10V | ELF | |
| H8/300, H8/300H, H8S | COFF | |
| i960 | COFF | |
| M68K | COFF, ELF * | |
| MIPS VR5xxx | ELF | |
| MIPS LSI TinyRISC | ELF | |
| MIPS TX39 | ELF | |
| PowerPC | EABI | |
| SH | COFF | |
| SPARC (MicroSPARC) | ELF | |
| V85x | ELF | |
| x86 | COFF |
* To use
the Motorola "Coldfire" version as the configuration to target, see Motorola
m68k development in GNUPro Tools
for Embedded Systems.
** See also Cygwin: a free porting layer for Unix applications for details about using the GNUPro tools for developing programs in the Win32 environment.
** See also Cygwin: a free porting layer for Unix applications for details about using the GNUPro tools for developing programs in the Win32 environment.
Version numbers for programs
Versions
of the tools shows the current version numbers for individual programs
in GNUPro Toolkit.
Versions of the tools
Naming hosts and targets
Your CD is
labeled to indicate the host (and target, if applicable) for which the
binaries in GNUPro Toolkit are configured. The specifications used for
hosts and targets in the configure script are based on a three-part naming
scheme, though the scheme is slightly different between hosts and targets.
The full naming
scheme for hosts encodes three pieces of information in the following standard
pattern.
Host names
Table
5: Naming hosts shows the usage of canonical names for referring
to the corresponding host platforms that Cygnus supports. For any questions
about compatibility, contact Cygnus (see How
to contact Cygnus).
Table 5: Naming hosts
| hppa1.1-hp-hpux11 | HP 9000/700, HP-UX B.11.0 |
| mips-sgi-irix5 | SGI Irix 5.3 |
Target names
The following
tables list some of the more common targets supported by Cygnus. Not all
targets have support on every host. See also Native
configurations support and Embedded
cross-configuration support for the matrices of the host/target combinations
supported by Cygnus. Also, for more informaton on using particular tools
and their targets, see GNUPro Tools
for Embedded Systems.
H8/300 processor name and output format
| sh-hms | COFF object code format |
i960 processor names and output format
M68K processor names and output formats
|
ELF object
code format *
|
* To use the Motorola "Coldfire" version as the configuration to target, see Motorola m68k development in GNUPro Tools for Embedded Systems.
MIPS processor names and output formats
|
mips64vr5xxx-elf
|
ELF object code format
|
| mips-elf | ELF object code format |
| mips-lsi-elf | ELF object code format |
PowerPC processor names and output formats
SH processor name and output format
SPARC processor names and output formats
|
sparc-coff
|
COFF object code format
|
| sparc-elf | ELF object code format |
| sparclet-aout | a.out object code format |
x86 processor names and output formats *
| i386-coff | COFF object code format |
*
See also Cygwin: a free
porting layer for Unix applications for details about using the GNUPro
tools for developing programs in the Win32 environment.
Using config.guess
config.guess
is a shell script that attempts to deduce the host type from which it is
called, using system commands like uname if they are available.
config.guess
is remarkably adept at deciphering the proper configuration for your host;
if you are building a tree to run on the same host on which you're building,
we recommend not specifying the hosttype argument.
config.guess
is called by configure ; you need never run it by hand, unless
you're curious about the output.
Top|Contents|Index|Next
|
© 2005 Red Hat, Inc. All rights reserved. About Red Hat : Legal statement : Privacy statement : Contact |