[Coco] FYI - 6809 GCC

[James Dessart]

I've been experimenting with Brian Dominy's changes to the 6809 port  
of gcc. All-in-all things seem to be good. 16-bit ints can be enabled  
with the option -mint16, and the use of registers for passing  
arguments can be avoided with -mnoreg-args, which allows the use of  
the libc I had modified for RSDOS.

It's a much smoother experience than I had things set up. His site  
<http://www.oddchange.com/gcc6809/> contains all the info you need to  
get set up. Apart from a Subversion client and a gcc tarball, and the  
crt libraries available on my gcc page <http://skwirl.ca/coco/ 
gcc.html>, everything is available through Brian's Subversion  
repository. I suggest the 2006-05-13 tag, since it's stable, and gcc  
3.4.6. This is what I'm working from.

His scripts will extract gcc for you, patch the sources, and then set  
the build in motion. It'll even install it for you.

One caveat, my libc doesn't seem to work well when it comes to using  
printf, et al. Varargs seems to break, and I'm not sure why.  
Unfortunately I have no idea how to run gdb using MESS, so I can't  
really debug the problem. But there's no reason why someone else  
couldn't just write a replacement that doesn't assume the use of the  
stack to pass arguments, and that is all-around better for RSDOS in  
general. Might be possible to write it in C, without resorting to  
assembler.

In fact, with some support in the linker, OS-9 software could be  
written easily. Or a modification of the assembler to generate rlink- 
compatible object files. I'm not conversant in OS-9, so I might just  
be leading you guys astray.

--
James Dessart
<http://skwirl.net/>