MIPS binutils

Introduction

For creating MIPS test traces we use GNU binutils: assembler, linker, and objdump. Usually they are provided for the same architecture as a host machine, but we can build them for cross-compiling, ie generating MIPS programs on x86 machines.

This cheat-sheet is based on this following instruction: http://www.linux-mips.org/wiki/Toolchains#Roll-your-own. See it if you have any problem or need more information.

Note: this instruction works only for Linux machines. It was verified on Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS (GNU/Linux 2.6.32-042stab084.26 x86_64).

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Getting binutils sources

• Binutils sources are available as submodule in MIPT-MIPS:

git submodule init
git submodule update
cd binutils

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Building binutils sources

• Create a folder where the binutils will be installed (can be any):

mkdir /opt/cross

• Create a folder for a build process (can be any):

cd /tmp
mkdir build-binutils && cd build-binutils

• Configure build (can dump a lot of info):

/path/to/binutils/configure --target=mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu --prefix=/opt/cross --disable-gprof --disable-gdb

Note that we disabled build of gprof and gdb as we do not use them.

• Make sources (can dump a lot of info):

make

• Install (can dump a lot of info):

make install

After that you should now have the cross-binutils installed under /opt/cross/bin/ with names prefixed by mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-.

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Set short names

It is convenient to give a short name to MIPS Binutils binaries. We suggest to put a short symlink into /usr/bin/, which also make the tools visible without modification of the $PATH.

For example:

cd /usr/bin
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-as mips-as
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-ld mips-ld
ln -s /opt/cross/bin/mipsel-unknown-linux-gnu-objdump mips-objdump