How to build AmigaOS4 cross-compiler (Binutils 2.23.2 & GCC 8.3.0) on CYGWIN

NOTE: all images are clickable for urls or fullsize images !

...Intro...



A year ago I wrote an article about building AmigaOS4 cross-compiler on MSYS2 just to try something different than Cygwin, which most of the time used by many amigaos4 developers as the cross compiler environment. And of course, MSYS2 can be used, but it has one disadvantage in comparing with Cygwin when it comes to porting from UNIX: clashes between win32 and Linux paths. And so, cmakes, autoconfs, and some other tools will bring you errors about clashing of "C:" vs "/".

Sure, if you write your apps for AmigaOS4 and cross-compile them, then it does not matter what your choice: MSYS2 or Cygwin. But if you do the porting work from Unix, and projects are big enough with the need of CMake, Autotools, and co, then you will be in need to fix path clashes.

Because of that, and because it seems the topic of some interest, I wrote this little how-to which I hope will be of use for developers who willing to do cross-compiling work, but don't want to lose their time to understand how to install it all.

...Prepare for compiling...



As noted on Cygwin's site "Cygwin is a large collection of GNU and Open Source tools which provide functionality similar to a Linux distribution on Windows". In human words, it means that this is some environment that we run and it gives us a nice shell with a scrollbar in which we can operate like we in Unix shell. All those "ls", "mkdir", "rm" and all sort of seds, awks and bashes/ashes :) There we build cross-compiler for the hardware we need (in our case for AmigaOS4) by Cygwin's GCC, and then use ready cross-compiler for produce amigaos4 binaries. The advantage of that is that we can use all range of up2date packages like CMake, Autoconf, Git, Subversion, Perl, Bison, Flex, Python and alt, and speed of x86 hardware (especially when you can build it with -j4). For example, building Irrlicht Engine on x5000/020 take about 20 minutes, while on some icore i5 with few 2.7ghz cores, with parallel building it takes just 2-3 minutes. Then you just simply transfer ready binary to real amigaos4 machine to test.



After we install Cygwin, we the same as with the case of MSYS2 will use the latest adtools repo https://github.com/sba1/adtools/, where Sebastian Bauer (sba1) maintain recent GCC and Binutils. At the time of writing the article, this is Binutils 2.23.2 and GCC 8.3.0. This time it also will be built with the support of LTO by default (it was changed later in adtools repo to have LTO enabled by default).

For cross-compilers purposes I use some HP notebook / icore 2.7ghz with windows10 onboard and the version of Cygwin we will use there are x64, but for x86 all will be probably the same, just installation binary will be different.

So, firstly we grab installer: https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe and run it.



There you choose a directory where to install it, answer few usual questions, choose the mirror from where download stuff (you can choose any, I usually choice first one) and then it will bring you a window where you choose what to install:



At first, there you choose none. Just press "next/next", so it will install only the necessary minimum. And then later you can update your setup by only packages you need, to avoid having a lot of unneeded stuff.
(Of course, you can install everything we need right at the beginning, without installing a "pure" minimum, and then updating. Just witch that way you will get into "how to update packages" from start, and will have fewer issues later).

Once it has done (pretty fast, the whole installation will have only 115mb of size at this point), you just go to the directory where you choose to install it and run "Cygwin.bat":



At this point, you, of course, do not have GCC which you need to build a cross-compiler, or anything else adtools may need, or any sort of tools/parsers/languages you may need when you doing porting work. So, let's install it.

Updating of Cygwin's deps (when you need newer Autoconf, or newer CMake, or newer anything, which happens from time to time) not _that_ intuitive as one may hope, but once you get in, all will be fine.

To update you don't run any "apt-get" or "yum" or whatever else from Cygwin's console. Instead, you AGAIN run your https://cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe.

Then there usual next/next thing, choice of mirror, etc. Then once the window where you choose packages to install come up, you choose in the "View" (placed at left) "Full" and in the search filed you type packages you need to install.

Like you type "GCC", there will be a list of many, choice "gcc-core", hit in the dropdown image to choose a version of it, then remove from search field your "gcc", and type the new name of packages.

In the end, you should choose that:

Quote:

See on the image above how it all should look like, and of which versions:



Then "Next", it will say that need more deps ((sure there will be many) to set this up, so again "next".

After our "update" installation is done, go to your Cygwin's console, type "gcc -v" to see that it installed and type some simple test case to check that Cygwin's GCC works.




... AmigaOS4 CrossCompiler...



Now, its time to install adtools (our cross-compiler) with the latest SDK, and all necessary dependencies need it to build it properly.

But firstly you should do set for git some magic settings without which you may have issues with building process:

Quote:

After that, we do a clone of adtools repo and doing some other preparation work. Just copy+paste these strings:

Quote:

Take care, that one of the latest string with "clone" command will take time which depends on your internet connection. The "adtools" directory after "clone" finished will be about 1 GB. Next 2 commands apply amigaos4 specific patches to Binutils and GCC 8, they fast.

After that, we have downloaded everything we need from adtools repo, and what we need next, is to build it properly with the latest SDK.

Then, we also install "lhasa". This is lha packer/unpacker on Unix, and we need that for adtools scripts to be able to unpack downloaded from Hyperion's server SDK.

Quote:


And not only that. In current adtools build scripts, there is a little issue: it downloads NOT latest SDK by some reasons, it download 53.24, while our current public one is 53.30. So, we fix that ourself:

in /amiga/adtools/native-build/makefile , on line 39 we change that:

Quote:

on that

Quote:

After that we ready to build a cross-compiler!

Just go to the to /amiga/adtools directory and type:

Quote:

It will take a while. Taking into account that today's PC all multicore, add -j4 at the end so to do parallel building and to speed things up.

Once it has done (it may take time too, depends on how fast your hardware is), all that you need is just issue our magic "export PATH=/usr/local/amiga/bin:$PATH" so Cygwin will know where to find amigaos4 compiler binaries.

And !NOTE! be sure you add that line to the /home/user/.bashrc file, so you will have no needs to worry anymore about it, and it will be auto executed all the time you run your Cygwin shell.

Done!



... Testing time ...

After we have done, let's test that all works. As of now, in adtools / gcc8.3.0, "lto" is enabled by default, so let's check usual hello world:

Quote:





... Tips and Tricks...

1.

If you want to do Unix ports, you often need to know how to use ./configure on cross-compiler to build right makefiles for amigaos4. Usually, the first arguments should be:

Quote:

After that come all the necessary options. But first 3 you can use most of the time (of course, if you on x86_64, if your build system other, you type there which one).

2.

Today more often used CMAKE, so to made good use of it on cross-compiler, you always can follow just that way:

Quote:

And then "make".

For simple things that will be enough (don't miss at the end those "..", they necessary). Of course, as in the case with ./configure, other options can come too in the same way.

You may also need to adjust "flags.make" file for linking line after CMAKE generate makefiles: it will be placed in build/CMakeFiles/your_project/flags.make


...Outro...

I hope that small howto will be of any help for developers willing to speed up their compiling times and to have the advantage of using the latest and stable versions of autotools/parsers/buildsystems/etc.

Thanks Kas1e

I had problems with reinstalling MSYS..Now I will try this setup...

@kas1e

works for me - thanks!

Hi kas1e

While compiling cross-compiler with your instructions.

I get the following error:

cd /
*** BFD does not support target powerpc-unknown-amigaos.
*** Look in bfd/config.bfd for supported targets.

Now I deleted /adtools..and I am trying to build it again

@Sinan
That means you probably didn't paste all the lines I show. You should 100% follow the way how i show it.

You don't need to do anything else , or go to any other directory, or touch any other file.

It seems that you may wrongly type "make -C native-build gcc-cross CROSS_PREFIX=/usr/local/amiga" command, maybe you forget about "gcc-cross" there?

The better way will be you just copy instructions, and paste them to shell. So by that way, we will surely know you didn't miss any command.

@kas1e

Quote:

Is there a way to automate this?
Like with amigaos4 ldflags or cppflags...or do we have to use this (really long) line everytime we want to build something?

@Raziel
Usually, you just copy+paste those things, but yes, if you don't want to paste it, you always can create some "amigaos4.cmake" file where put all those options (just in different syntax this time), and use it. But IMHO it makes more troubles: you need to create a file, put somewhere, thinking about where it, while you can easily just copy those string to buffer and paste them to the shell. Without needs to type it manually of course :)

But yeah, for example for Odyssey, i use that "amigaos4.cmake" which i place in the root of project:

Quote:

But that I do only for Odyssey, because it originally was like this, and there toooo many other .cmake files with all sort of flags, so i had to do it like this. But I prefer first way, it is faster and clean. Once things go wrong, you know what and where to change fast and then copy+paste it.

For myself i doing porting work like this: i create some .txt file, in which i note at first that CMAKE lines. Then i copy + paste them into the shell. See if it works, if not, i update cmake lines in my .txt, and again copy+paste to shell. Step by step fix all, and then i have .txt with ready cmake line for each project. And when time passed, i can back and see all in .txt. Without needs to remember where and what and how it was.

@kas1e

The reason (I think) was probably faulty HD and antivirus software (Avast). I build whole thing on another PC with Eset (but de-activated during installion)

Now it works fine..

I wonder copying up whole Cygwin64 directory (7,6 GB) to another PC would work ?

Thanks for your efforts..This is very useful beginners..

@Sinan
Quote:

Yes, 100% possible. I even have one of my first os4-cygwin-cross-compiler-install" started about 10 years ago, with zerohero' crosscompilers, which is packed in some tar.gz file of 10 gb size and which one migrated many times over different hardware. Just you need to be sure you pack it all by normal archiver, which will not broke for you softlinks and stuff.

@kas1e

That's what I was looking for, thank you

@kas1e
"Just you need to be sure you pack it all by normal archiver, which will not broke for you softlinks and stuff."

You got an example of an archiver, I got no clue when it comes to Windows applications?
Would be good to back it up while it's fresh.

@khayoz
I do pack all with the latest WinRAR, but probably better to use something like p7zip. At least my first Cygwin installation was packed by rar, and I was able to reuse it on another computer

@kas1e

Thanks!
And if you wonder about my lack of Windows knowledge, I did the Cygwin install under Mac OS X with Virtualbox with Win7 32-bit(yeah I know, but that's the only legal version i own) ;)

@kas1e

I followed your guide and am stuck with compiling the lhasa program (seems i either missed something or installed the wrong version)

@Raziel

That error mean that you probably didn't install all the necessary steps as I show there:

http://kas1e.mikendezign.com/aos4/cro ... mages/cygwin_install4.jpg

They should be of that exact versions.

Error show you didn't have threads.pm, which is Perl's module, which it didn't work mean something wrong with Perl installation.

Try to close Cygwin shell, and open again, and repeat steps for Lhasa. If that didn't help, then in Cygwin's install window check what version of Perl you have and update or reinstall it.

@kas1e
Oh?
I didn't care about the versions...i thought the newest ones should work as well.

How do i know which versions i need to update then (if new versions arrive)?

@Raziel
Quote:

I install the latest versions all the years, and all ok of course. Just as you have problems which shouldn't happen, I just suggest copying 1:1 the exact things as all others do.

Your error just looks like wrong installation of Perl, or something with Paths, or so. Just be 100% sure you install all the components I show, as well as maybe try after installation close Cygwin shell and run it again. Be sure that you didn't do anything which you should do.

Maybe you install too old versions of Autoconf/Autotools. If I were you, then I just follow exactly versions I show to make it all works, then, if all ok, it will mean that some component was too old on your setup or something.

In other words, repeat all steps 1:1 and the same versions of everything.

Quote:

You will know that a new version of anything needs it when you will trying to do something and will have errors saying that some of your components are too old. That can not happen in the next few years, or can happens soon :) Don't worry about

@kas1e

Yes, i had the latest version of perl installed (instead of the one you listed), now it works.

One more question.
I take it the "SDK" used to cross-compile to amigaos4 is the same as the SDK i install natively, correct?
If so, it should be possible to simply copy my native SDK over to the pc and use that instead of painfully downloading all of third party libs (libSDL, libFLAC etc.)?

@Raziel
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So it was too new Perl? Strange... Maybe just was something wrong with installation for some reason? But if it works, then good.

Quote:

In theory yes, you can just copy your whole SDK directory to the /usr/local/amiga/SDK now. Or, go painfully way to download lib by lib :) I doing last way, just because I often mess SDK with all sorts of test libs, and when I install some new version of cross-compiler it always a good time to clean it all and start from "clean" SDK. But sure, you should be able to just copy the whole SDK directory.

@kas1e

kk, all installed, test project compiled and working.

first error on project i'd like to port
Quote:
gettext was not installed, but the same error comes up after installing the package

and a question:
are projects "recompilable" for amigaos4 if they use packages that are not available natively on amigaos4, like glib 2.0, libdotconf etc.

I guess yes, but if the needed resources aren't available on amigaos4 they probably won't run, correct?