Toolchain¶

• Table of contents
• Toolchain
  • • Binary packages
    • Building from source
    • Building old branches
    • Mac OS X

To compile the target firmware for OsmocomBB or SIMtrace, you need a GNU toolchain for ARM. You can either use binary packages provided by your distribution (recommended), or build a toolchain from source code yourself. There are various pre-compiled toolchains available (e.g. Code Sourcery), but not all of them will produce working firmware. We're trying to support all these configurations, but it might take a while to identify the source of a problem. If you have persistent errors when compiling, try using a different package.

Binary packages¶

You can use a pre-compiled toolchain provided by your GNU/Linux distribution.

For Debian based distributions (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc.), use the following command:

$ sudo apt install gcc-arm-none-eabi

For ArchLinux (https://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/arm-none-eabi-gcc/):

$ sudo pacman -S arm-none-eabi-gcc arm-none-eabi-newlib

The following versions are confirmed to work:

Name            : arm-none-eabi-gcc
Version         : 10.2.0-1
---
Name            : arm-none-eabi-binutils
Version         : 2.34-1
---
Name            : arm-none-eabi-newlib
Version         : 3.3.0-1

Building from source¶

If a pre-compiled toolchain provided by your distribution fails to produce working firmware images, you can build your own toolchain known to be working with OsmocomBB, see here: GnuArmToolchain.

Building old branches¶

If you need to build the firmware from old unmaintained branches (sylvain/burst_ind, sylvain/testing, jolly/testing, etc.), an older version of toolchain is needed.

This combination is known to work:

• binutils 2.21.1a,
• newlib 1.19.0,
• gcc 4.8.2.

It can be compiled using our Dockerfiles:

$ git clone https://gitea.osmocom.org/osmocom/docker-playground
$ cd docker-playground/arm-none-eabi-gcc-4.8.2
$ make

Usage example:

$ cd osmocom-bb
$ docker run --user $(id -u) -v $(pwd):/data -it --rm root/arm-none-eabi-gcc-4.8.2
# cd /data/src
# make firmware

When using toolchain with GCC >=4.8, the firmware can be compiled, but will hang as soon as you want to sync to an ARFCN.
This issue has been fixed in master: http://cgit.osmocom.org/osmocom-bb/commit/?id=a903b3c1ee27047c79728b18ff6340d23d1aad2e.

Mac OS X¶

Apparently the arm-elf-gcc 4.3.2 from ports for MacOS X can compile the firmware as well after symlinking /opt/local/bin/arm-elf-ranlib to /opt/local/bin/arm-elf-linux-ranlib and /opt/local/bin/arm-elf-strip to /opt/local/bin/arm-elf-linux-strip. If you omit the links, there will be unresolvable references to symbols in the libraries.