Building a Cross Compilation Toolchain for MIPS32 - Part II

I spent about 3 days trying to get the cross compilation toolchain for MIPS 32 working. Maybe this wasn't enough time, but it was all of the time I had before I had to stick a knife in the effort and call it done - unsuccessfully.

Compiling the toolchain is essentially done in 3 steps:
1. Compile binutils for the target architecture
2. Compile a lightweight C compiler for the target architecture
3. Compile a standard C Library (e.g. glibc) for the target architecture using the compiler from step 2.

I could never make this work. I could usually get #1 to work. I could usually get #2 to work. I could never get #3 to work.

At this point, I went back and reverse-engineered the toolchain that OpenWRT was using for MIPS32. The CMakefiles, scripts, and generated Makefiles were extremely complex. And I saw patches being used in several places. Patches to scripts. Patches to Makefiles. Patches to header files.

At that point, I decided I didn't have the time or bandwidth to complete the project of building a cross-compilation toolchain successfully.

I decided instead to try and use the one from OpenWRT that was already built. More on that in a subsequent post.