Cleese and a New Toolchain

Back in July 2003, I had an idea to "make the Python intepreter a micro-kernel and boot directly to the Python prompt". Thus started Cleese, which I worked on with Dave Long. We made a good deal of progress and I learned a tremendous amount.

In February 2007, I moved Cleese from SourceForge to Google Code Project Hosting in the hope of restarting work on it. In between 2003 and 2007 I'd become a switcher and so I needed to work out how to do on OS X what I'd been doing with a very strange hybrid of Windows command line and Cygwin before. Alas I never got around to that part.

Then about a week ago, inspired by Brian Rosner's interest in the project, I decided to give it another go. I also decided to use it as an opportunity to finally learn Git.

First goal: build a "hello world" kernel (no Python yet). Fortunately I had one from the initial stages of Cleese 2003, but it wouldn't build. In particular ld was barfing on the -T option used to specify a linking script (which OS X's ld doesn't support).

After asking some questions on the #osdev channel on freenode, I discovered I'd need a completely new gcc and binutils toolchain to support i386-elf. This didn't turn out to be difficult at all, though.

Here were my steps:

export PREFIX=/Users/jtauber/Projects/cleese/toolchain
export TARGET=i386-elf


cd ~/Projects/cleese
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.19.tar.gz
mkdir toolchain
tar xvzf binutils-2.19.tar.gz
cd binutils-2.19
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX --target=$TARGET --disable-nls
make
make install
cd ..
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gcc/gcc-4.2.4/gcc-core-4.2.4.tar.bz2
bunzip2 gcc-core-4.2.4.tar.bz2
tar xvf gcc-core-4.2.4.tar
cd gcc-4.2.4
./configure --prefix=$PREFIX --target=$TARGET --disable-nls --enable-languages=c --without-headers
make all-gcc
make install-gcc

Now my "hello world" kernel builds. Next goal...working out how to programmatically build disk images for VMware Fusion (or, failing that, Qemu)

Syndicated 2008-11-03 03:43:26 (Updated 2008-11-03 03:44:59) from James Tauber