Hello everyone.

I know that my threads seem a little weird, techical and complicated, sometimes I'm afraid to be mistaken for troll.

A little flashback
When I was a kid I always wanted to build my operative system from scratch, my linux distro, to be more precise.. I've discovered Linux From Scratch but I was too lazy or young to understand all these commands obscure and hard to understand.

A couple of years ago, after having gained a lot of experience with various distros such as Slackware, Slax, Slitaz, Debian, Ubuntu and Puppy Linux, I decided to dive inside that book and I became addicted to it.
The most interesting part was Chapter 5: Constructing a Temporary System as it taught me how to build a indipendent temporary system isolated from the host.

Then I've learned about cross-compiling and musl-libc from clfs-embedded.

Now for the central part of the topic

One of the things that I didn't like about LFS and cross-compilers is that building the GNU toolchain (especially GCC) takes a lot of time and it's big.

Are there any alternatives to the GNU tools? (Glibc, GCC, Binutils)

I only need a C compiler and a C Library that is able to rebuild itself and is able to compile the following things:

• binutils (or an equivalent package that provides ld, as, ar, ranlib, etc )
• the Linux Kernel (bzImage, headers and modules)
• busybox
• python? - this is not extremely required, one Programming language is enough.

Can you also explain me how to make a cross-compiler that works using that tools? I'm already struggling with this and that

The targets of the cross-compiler should be i486 and ARMv6 with soft floating point. For the i486 architecture I could figure out myself how to do it. Every kind of help that you will give me is appreciated.

Thanks for your patience

GCC is big. There's llvm. Glibc is big. There's uclibc. But beside X, they're insignificant, and beside X apps, they're tiny. Use Binutils, or use a different OS. There are minimal and arm based versions of various distros.

LLVM & Uclibc suck, in various ways. No compiler has the range of languages that GCC has. Uclibc PRESUMES you're ok with an en_US locale, and it sucks compiling awkward stuff. Choose a minimal distro. Not to be ignored is damnsmalllinux.

If you're doing an arm based distro yourself, FBBG. Follow the book. Tell us exactly what you are doing and people can help more.

Basically, I'm a geek, I like playing with Linux and with devices that are running using a Linux kernel (Can you see where this is going?). I usually like playing with command-line tools, I like to cross-compile them statically and install them on my mobile: I've cross-compiled (using a musl-libc + gcc + binutils) cross-compiler rsync, Python 2, Python 3, GNU Make, proot (I've used the script inside the package for that) and Busybox. However now I would like to install a C compiler inside my terminal and use it to build software from my phone instead of requiring a PC.

I know that there are APKs out there that allow me to install debian inside my mobile with (or without) root but I would like to build my tools from scratch.

I know a couple of compilers that are tiny and can rebuild themselves such as TCC but it's not enough to build common software such as a C library, and then we have PCC..These are small projects that can be build. Other alternatives?

How do you build that cross-compiler?

What do you mean?

This is what you're looking for.

What you're basically asking for is from scratch OS development and not from scratch Linux development. There are smaller, less featured toolchains out there but, don't expect much past C99 and don't expect i18n support. That first link is the most extensive free info on the subject I've found since the days of 8 bit CPUs. Unlike the past, it's hardly done (OS Dev) outside of big corps and universities these days. The hardware vendors have become shameful greedy scrooges that no longer give away things like BIOS source and schematics to the everyday customer. Instead its binary blobs, NSA backdoors and NDAs if you can actually get on their developer lists.

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