68008 SRAM Microcomputer - Software Toolchain

Hello,

this is not nice. It's a PITA but everyone uses it: The Gnu Compiler Collection; here with a backend to produce m68k object code. I suffered for some hours, but then i had success: The first test program compiled! Let's see how it works. (and leave out most of whatever did not work.)

Compiling the GCC is not a trivial task, you need a GCC and lot's of other tools, they should match each other, find each other and work on my desktop machine.

Mac Ports (the port system i use on my Mac to port 'alien' stuff) was no help though right now i can see they provide a (very outdated) version of the rtems tool chain. Yesterday i installed a toolchain for ARM and the Mac Ports ARM GCC for Linux is so old that it even fails to install (it's from 2005, today is 2014!)

OSdev.org is a great site but still a little bit over-complicated. (Ok, actually it's the GCC which is over-complicated.)

Next was rtems.org, a project for real-time embedded micro systems. The project supports the 68k CPUs but it's not the bare GCC but with their added extra. Maybe i'll cherry-pick some sources from them... :-) In the first place i didn't realize that this project already comes with a whole OS, else i had eventually skipped it. But so i downloaded the whole stuff from rtems.

Starting from their start page it was only three clicks away from rtems.org/ftp/pub/rtems/people/chrisj/source-builder/source-builder.html.

Following the instructions i did:

$ cd
$ mkdir -p development/rtems/src
$ cd development/rtems/src
$ git clone git://git.rtems.org/rtems-source-builder.git
$ cd rtems-source-builder
$ source-builder/sb-check
$ cd rtems
$ ../source-builder/sb-set-builder --list-bsets
$ ../source-builder/sb-set-builder --log=l-m68k.txt \
  --prefix=$HOME/development/rtems/4.11 4.11/rtems-m68k

(Actually i installed into a different directory, but that doesn't make much difference.) After waiting roughly one hour a couple of new GCC instances entered this world.

The rtems people have configured their installation scripts so that the resulting tool names all start with "m68k-rtems4.11-" which is different to "m68k-elf-" which is normally used. Probably there is a good reason for that.

Next i stumbled over the bitsnbikes blogger site. J. Silva started a 68008 project in 2010 and described the sources for his first "project". He had borrowed from others and i borrowed from him:

For the first successful test i needed 4 files and two commands:
(You can find all files in my first project folder at little-bat.de)

  • "main.c" the main source file with function main()
  • "crt0.S" an assembler file with the bootstrapping code
  • "ldscript.ld" a configure script for the loader
  • "Makefile" ah well, a Makefile

$ export PATH=$HOME/development/rtems/4.11/bin:$PATH
$ make

This actually produced an S-Record file which i can download into an Eprom. Fine!

S00B0000746573742E53313949
S1130000000800000008000841F900000400203C3A
S113001000000400B1C06704421860F841F9000808
S1130020004E43F900000400203C00000400B089A5
S1130030670412D860F842A742A742A74EB9000845
S1110040004C4FEF000C6000FFFE00004E75F8
S9030000FC

I don't know whether this will work because i haven't even built the hardware. ;-)

The software toolchain for the 68008 board is up and running! :-)

    ... Kio !