differences between the versions of binutils

hippykin · Post by **hippykin** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 2:37 pm

Hello, i recently had a rather interesting and infuriating problem with binutils: i have a simple kernel which prints "hello world" to the screen, i developed it to this stage on fedora 8 - using the already resident gcc & binutils (specifically Ld), i developed using binutils 2.17. For uninteresting reasons i recently had to change my build environment into [gasp with horror] cygwin (under windows vista!!), i built a cross compiler (gcc-3.4.4 & binutils 2.16.1) and for some reason Ld insisted on creating a binary which was 256 KB in size, when built on FC8 with binutils 2.17 it had been just 3 KB, eventually i managed to solve the problem by using the MEMORY directive in my liker script, i am not posting in the other forums because i solved the problem - clearly there are differences between the ways the Ld linker in binutils 2.17 and 2.16.1 treat liker scripts - i don't know what they are but perhaps they should be mentioned in the wiki if someone knows.

Thanks

Combuster · Post by **Combuster** » Sat Mar 15, 2008 5:11 pm

That reminds me of that good ole saying: Have you got the latest version?

My OS doesn't compile with a pre-2.17 binutils either, only for a different reason.

hippykin · Post by **hippykin** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 9:40 am

yes, i couldn't get binutils 2.17 to build under cygwin

Solar · Post by **Solar** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 10:02 am

Hmmm... GCC Cross-Compiler indicates otherwise (2.17 being successfully tested with GCC 4.1.*).

Make sure you use the source tarballs from gnu.org, not those coming with Cygwin!

frank · Post by **frank** » Mon Mar 17, 2008 7:42 pm

hippykin wrote:yes, i couldn't get binutils 2.17 to build under cygwin

Also make sure that you set the file mode to binary when you ran the cygwin setup program.

hippykin · Post by **hippykin** » Sun Mar 23, 2008 1:05 pm

I was trying to build a cross compiler with 64 bit support hosted on a 32 bit machine (i don't know how relevant the table is when trying to do this) - thank you for all your suggestions and sorry if i somehow seem to have started 'help me' thread in the wiki forum.