Anatomy of an Embedded Linux System - The GNU Compiler Collection

The GCC compiler, like the kernel, is designed for portability. Like all open source programs, GCC is available in source form, and you can compile the code to create your own compiler. Part of the compilation process of GCC involves configuring the project; during that step, you can configure GCC to produce code for a different target processor and thus become a cross-compiler.

However, the compiler is only one part of the tool chain necessary to produce running code. You must also get a linker, a C standard library, and a debugger. These are separate, albeit related, projects in Linux. This separation is vexing for engineers used to tools from a certain company in Redmond, Washington, where the tools are monolithic in nature. But not to worry; when you’re working on an embedded project, this separation is an advantage, because the additional choice lets you select the right tool for your application.

The GCC compiler installed on your host machine is preconfigured to use the GNU C Standard Library, frequently called glibc. Most embedded projects use an alternate, smaller library called uClibc for embedded development.



GDB
The GNU Debugger (GDB) project deserves a special mention. It’s the most commonly used debugger on Linux systems. Although it’s frequently included in the tool chain, GDB is a separate, independent project.

For embedded development, GDB is compiled so that it can debug code running on a different processor than the debugger, much like GCC can cross-compile code. This sort of debugging adds another complication: the machine running the debugger is rarely the machine running the code to be debugged. Debugging code in this fashion is called remote debugging and is accomplished by running the program to be debugged with a stub program that communicates with another host where the debugger is running.

The stub program in this case is gdbserver, and it can communicate by serial or TCP connection with a host running GDB. Using gdbserver also has practical considerations because at only 100KB, give or take, it’s small enough in terms of size and resources required when running on even the most resource constrained targets.

Source of Information : Pro Linux Embedded Systems (December 2009)