5.6. Installing Binutils-2.14 - Pass 1

5.6.1. Contents of Binutils

Binutils is a collection of software development tools containing a linker, assembler and other tools to work with object files and archives.

Installed programs: addr2line, ar, as, c++filt, gprof, ld, nm, objcopy, objdump, ranlib, readelf, size, strings and strip

Installed libraries: libiberty.a, libbfd.[a,so] and libopcodes.[a,so]

5.6.2.

5.6.3. Binutils Installation Dependencies

Binutils depends on: Bash, Coreutils, Diffutils, GCC, Gettext, Glibc, Grep, Make, Perl, Sed, Texinfo.

5.6.4.

5.6.5. Installation of Binutils

It is important that Binutils be the first package to get compiled, because both Glibc and GCC perform various tests on the available linker and assembler to determine which of their own features to enable.

Even though Binutils is an important toolchain package, we are not going to run the test suite at this early stage. First, the test suite framework is not yet in place and second, the programs from this first pass will soon be overwritten by those installed in the second pass.

This package is known to behave badly when you have changed its default optimization flags (including the -march and -mcpu options). Therefore, if you have defined any environment variables that override default optimizations, such as CFLAGS and CXXFLAGS, we recommend unsetting or modifying them when building Binutils.

The Binutils documentation recommends building Binutils outside of the source directory in a dedicated build directory:

mkdir ../binutils-build
cd ../binutils-build

If you want the SBU values listed in the rest of the book to be of any use, you will have to measure the time it takes to build this package. To achieve this easily, you could do something like: time { ./configure ... && ... && ... && make install; }.

Now prepare Binutils for compilation:

../binutils-2.14/configure \
    --prefix=/tools --disable-nls

The meaning of the configure options:

• --prefix=/tools: This tells the configure script to prepare to install the Binutils programs in the /tools directory.

• --disable-nls: This disables internationalization (a word often shortened to i18n). We don't need this for our static programs and nls often causes problems when linking statically.

Continue with compiling the package:

make configure-host
make LDFLAGS="-all-static"

The meaning of the make parameters:

• configure-host: This forces all the subdirectories to be configured immediately. A statically linked build will fail without it. We therefore use this option to work around the problem.

• LDFLAGS="-all-static": This tells the linker that all the Binutils programs should be linked statically. However, strictly speaking, "-all-static" is first passed to the libtool program which then passes "-static" on to the linker.

And install the package:

make install

Now prepare the linker for the "locking in" of Glibc later on:

make -C ld clean
make -C ld LDFLAGS="-all-static" LIB_PATH=/tools/lib

The meaning of the make parameters:

• -C ld clean: This tells the make program to remove all the compiled files, but only in the ld subdirectory.

• -C ld LDFLAGS="-all-static" LIB_PATH=/tools/lib: This option rebuilds everything in the ld subdirectory. Specifying the LIB_PATH makefile variable on the command line allows us to override the default value and have it point to our temporary tools location. The value of this variable specifies the linker's default library search path. You'll see how this preparation is used later on in the chapter.

Do not yet remove the Binutils build and source directories. You will need them again in their current state a bit further on in this chapter.