I’m still testing out a few options of cross-compilers. This time I’ve built a MinGW cross-compiler for i786 ELF format binaries. As I’ve been pointed out – MinGW does not have any dependencies on external libraries (like Cygwin) and it does not have problems with DOS paths (like Cygwin, which I could not force to work in Eclipse CDT).

Prerequisites

You’ll need the following software:

1. MinGW
2. MPFR, GMP and MPC libraries
3. Latest release of Binutils source
4. Latest release of GCC source

Installing MinGW and libraries

MinGW installation is straight forward, also you’ll need to install:

• C Compiler
• C++ Compiler (just in case)
• MSYS Basic System
• and MinGW Developer Toolkit

After you’re done with that, it’s good to add MinGW directories to PATH, so that you can use MinGW tools from Command Prompt. If you install MinGW to it’s default location, then these are the paths you are looking for:

• C:\MinGW\bin
• C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin

Now fire up cmd.exe and install necessary libraries with this command: mingw-get install gmp mpfr mpc

Compiling the cross-compiler

I found this rather old article on how to do it, but following it through was quite easy. I’ll lead you through with a small step-by-step guide:

1. Download Binutils and GCC source from the links above, extract them under C:\build-gcc (C:\build-gcc\binutils-x.y.z and C:\build-gcc\gcc-x.y.z, where x.y.z is the version of sources you’ve downloaded);
2. Download these shell scripts to c:\build-gcc (these shell scripts are a little bit updated versions of the ones in the how-to wiki;
3. Create a directory C:\cross-gcc;
4. Now fire up cmd.exe and enter bash shell, simply type bash and hit enter (this should work, because you added MinGW to PATH variable);
5. In bash type this command first: cd /c/build-gcc/ and ./build_binutils.sh this will start a binutils build process;
6. After binutills have successfully been installed call ./build_gcc.sh and it will build your gcc cross compiler;
7. Voila, you’re done! Now you can add the newly created cross-compilers to your PATH to use them with your make scripts in your IDE.

Side note – for me AVG anti-virus somehow did report that “configtest.exe” was carrying a Trojan.Generic26, I just simply ignored that. 🙂

Here’s the same VS2010 project of dummy kernel and bootloader, with MinGW cross-compiler as the main build system