OSELAS.Toolchain launched

Hi Jonathan,

We've released OSELAS.Toolchain() 1.1.0 this week, which might be worth
a note in LWN.

During the last years, we have intensively used crosstool to build our
toolchains for embedded linux systems, but over the time it turned more
and more out that crosstool has other aims than we have: they want to
compare compilers, which means that they always have to be able to build
all the old toolchains down to 2.95.3. That also means that they have to
carry all the old hacks around, and with most of them nobody knows any
more why they are necessary.

For us, being embedded linux people, it is more important to have access
to the latest and greatest, so after playing around with crosstool for
some years and trying to make it better, we came to the conclusion that,
with PTXdist, we already have most of the infrastructure we need for
building toolchains: a staging model (get, prepare, extract, compile,
install, targetinstall), a Kconfig frontend for easy configuration,
autogenerated dependencies, a clean patch management system. So we tried
it out and the result is OSELAS.Toolchain(). It is now able to build a
full suite of gcc-4.1.2 toolchains for many different arm platforms,
including big endian, iwmmxt etc., for mips, powerpc and x86. After the
release we added newlib support to the trunk and uClibc will probably
also come soon, which shows the great flexibility.

We hope that it does not only serve our commercial needs (toolchains are
bread and botter for our support projects), but also makes the upstream
toolchains better, due to our testing activities.

For details:

http://www.pengutronix.de/oselas/toolchain/index_en.html

Cheers,
Robert
-- 
 Dipl.-Ing. Robert Schwebel | http://www.pengutronix.de
 Pengutronix - Linux Solutions for Science and Industry
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