Using cross-compilation tools in kernel-build

Question

I'm in the middle of building a linux kernel on a beagleboard-xm (following this tutorial - I'm on step 10). I keep requiring a lot of cross-compilation tools with the prefix arm-linux-gnueabi. The only one I've been able to install is arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc, and now I need arm-linux-gnueabi-ld.

My questions are:

• Do I need to use cross-compilation tools like this if I'm building the kernel on the same computer it will be running on?
• How do I install these cross-compilation tools? I have furiously googled arm-linux-gnueabi with very little results.

Answer 1

Answer to your first question is - No. You don't need cross compilation tools if you're building the kernel on the same computer that it'll run. Host compiler toolchain will do the work for you.

Answer to the second question - two ways you can do it:

 a) using existing cross compilation tools (already build), you can download it via Software Center of any popular distro like Fedora, Ubuntu. Cross compilation will be prefixed with platform name i.e if you need arm tool chains it will be something like arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc.

 b) You can build your own cross compilation tool chains from the source of GCC. It's quite difficult and time consuming stuff.

But, you can avoid all the above steps and can use tools like buildroot, openembedded etc. Which will ease all the task for you and help you to build a nice embedded kernel for you. These tools done all the cross compilation related toolchain build, kernel building, rootfs generation tasks for you. Hope it'll help!