Difference between revisions of "MIPS port"

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(Add "health warning" since what's discussed here might no longer be up to date since the port is being worked on.)
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{{MIPS_port}}
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''Health warning: these notes describe the situation as of circa 2.2.4. Since then a branch of 2.0.0 has been posted to Sourceforge, this has been merged back into the mainline sources and as of February 2012 is being worked on. The final result may be a usable compiler and libraries during the lifetime of 2.6.0, although it might only be available from the Subversion repository.''
  
 
The Free Pascal MIPS port is under development. It generates mipsel 32-bits binaries, which should run in mips 32-bits and 64-bits processors.
 
The Free Pascal MIPS port is under development. It generates mipsel 32-bits binaries, which should run in mips 32-bits and 64-bits processors.

Revision as of 16:38, 8 February 2012

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Health warning: these notes describe the situation as of circa 2.2.4. Since then a branch of 2.0.0 has been posted to Sourceforge, this has been merged back into the mainline sources and as of February 2012 is being worked on. The final result may be a usable compiler and libraries during the lifetime of 2.6.0, although it might only be available from the Subversion repository.

The Free Pascal MIPS port is under development. It generates mipsel 32-bits binaries, which should run in mips 32-bits and 64-bits processors.

MIPS Architectures

MIPS can be divided into the following targets for a code generator:

  • MIPS 32-bits Endian Little - named mipsel
  • MIPS 32-bits Endian Big - named mips
  • MIPS 64-bits Endian Little - named mips64el
  • MIPS 64-bits Endian Big - named mips64

These names are compatible with the ones used in Linux.

It should be noted that 64-bits MIPS processors can run 32-bits software and that Debian, for example, only offers pre-compiled CDs for 32-bits mips and mipsel, so usually one simply writes 32-bits software for MIPS or MIPS-EL, ignoring the possibility of writing 64-bits software.

Step 1 - Downloading Cross-Binutils

These are the basic tools necessary to create executables, such as: Linker (ld), Assembler (as), Archiver (ar) (Creates smartlinking .a files), strip and some others.

From Linux to Linux-MIPS

Step 2 - Cross-compiler

Building from source

Step 1 - Install FPC 2.2.4

Step 2 - Get the latest FPC sources from subversion: http://www.freepascal.org/develop.html#svn

Step 3 - The Build process

Building with Lazarus

Open the project fpctrunk\compiler\ppmipsel.lpi and build it. The compiler executable should be in fpctrunk\compiler\mips\pp.exe

Building with the makefiles

Note: This will only possible with make cycle is activated for mips, at the moment this method cannot be used.

We will supose that your fpc compiler is located here: C:\Programas\fpc\bin\i386-win32

And your Free Pascal source code is located here: C:\Programas\fpctrunk

In order to build the cross compiler it is necessary to have a correct PATH environment variable. On Windows it is very easy to get a PATH crowded with information put by installers. To ensure that your path is correct, create a batch file with the following code:

cd C:\Programas\fpctrunk\
PATH=C:\Programas\fpc\bin\i386-win32;C:\Programas\arm
make cycle CPU_TARGET=mipsel OS_TARGET=linux
pause

Run this batch to compiler the compiler. On the end of the compile you should not see any errors.

You should have a ppccrossmips.exe in C:\Programas\fpc\compiler and some .o and .ppu files in C:\Programas\fpc\rtl\units\mipsel-linux

Now copy those files to your Free Pascal installation. The cross compiler ppccrossarm.exe should go to C:\Programas\fpc\bin\arm-wince and the units to C:\Programas\fpc\units\arm-wince

References