gcc/H8S for dummies

Preface

I created this page as notes on how to install the wonderfull GNU tool chain for Hitachi H8S aka H8/300 in Windows.

I have some +25 years of programming experience under my belt. A conservative estimate would be that I've written well over 100.000 lines of deployed C,C++,Java and Pascal code, not to mention +10.000 lines of assembler for 68HC11,68000,Z80 and then some. I've been doing this on DOS,Unix,Windows not to mention half a dozen totally forgotten systems. I've programmed in FORTRAN, BASIC, Lisp, SmallTalk, I've dabled with COBOL,Python,Perl and then some. I've used about half a dozen C-compilers and twice as many editors. I've programmed embedded systems, desktop applications, drivers, database systems, compilers ..and so on and so on... and I still program daily.

And yet I have problems with Linux/GNU tools. The tools, the documentation and the people who create them assume such a familiarity with their way of doing things that the un-initiated is easily at loss. Also they expect everybody is doing-it-in-Linux, whereas the rest of us are realy stuck with Windows, no matter how hard we try to get rid of it. Of course, the right thing to do, would be to learn it all by heart and become one of the in-crowd.

Meanwhile, this page is for dummies like me.

BTW: Most of the substance of this page comes from h8300-hms.sourceforge.net , I've just provided my commentary and corrected some mistakes.

So, what we are trying to do here (like Ludwig XIV, I often talk about meself in 3rd person ;-) is to install a free cross compiler for H8S processos so that we write some code in Windows and dumpit to a H8S CPU for execution. GNU gcc is a free (in all senses of the word) C-compiler that somebody has been good enough patch to support the Hitatchi chip. GNU tools are designed to run in unix-like systems, nowdays usually in Linux. One thing to understand about all unixes is that there is no binary standard for executables and their interface to the OS. Thus you cannot use unix tools unless somebody has the source code and can compile the tools. Very often this somebody is you. Like in this case.

If you, like me, have to use Windows, you need a way to somehow emulate unix like enviroment. The MS-DOS box looks like it could be part of the solution and I believe that with Mingw tools it becomes one. For various reasons I'm more familiar with Cygwin, so I go along with that. Cygwin is a kind of Linux/Unix emulator that runs on top Windows and lets those familiar with Unix use their PC via the time honoured shell based command line interface. BTW I've written a Linux/Unix tutorial for dummies like me.

And to compile the gcc source code you need a compiler, which of course is distributed in source form. Bit of a chicken and egg problem, huh. Fortunatelly Cygwin comes with precompiled gcc compiler, which you can use to compile the compiler with different configuration so that it can be used as a cross compiler to compile code in Windows for execution in you target system.

Installing Cygwin

Go to the Cygwin homepage or click here to install Cygwin . Use the setup wizard and accept default values until you get to the 'Select packages' screen. Maximize the window and on the 'Category' column locate the package 'Devel' (BTW Make sure that the text next to the button "View" says "Category", if not keep clicking that button until it does.). On the right side of that there is a text 'Default'. Keep clicking that text until it changes to 'Install'. Then go on and finish the install. On 100 kB/s connection and with my 2.4 GHz laptop this took less than half an hour, glad I did not need the whole of Cygwin (but then I already had the basic system installed)!

Some Cygwin Notes

Cygwin usually installs in 'C:\cygwin'. Under that there are several directories that probably are familiar to unix users, such as 'bin','usr' and 'etc'. Most important is the directory 'home' under which the installer will create your home directory, based on your Windows user name. This is you home directory, ofthen refered to in command line as '~'. Thus in my case my home directory is (my user name is 'nyholku'):

C:\cygwin\home\nyholku

Locating the Necessary Files

binutils-2.13.2.tar.bz2 gcc-core-3.1.1.tar.bz2 h8300-hms-gcc-3.1-1.patch newlib-1.11.0.tar.gz gdb-5.2.1.tar.bz2 

Unfortunatelly I cannot tell you were to find these files, I used Google with the exact file names and was able to find them pretty quickly, but all from different sources -- funny thing. Be sure to get just these versions, otherwise you will probably run out of luck before you are finished. In which case you need to start allover again, and that ain't fun as this will take several hours before you are done. The voice of experience.

Note that downloading the archives is best done using ftp as sometimes (have not figured out when) a browser (don't want to name InternerExploder as the culprit) saves some files in bad format if accessing a gnu mirror using http. So what I did was I googled for 'filename funet' (funet is the local gnu mirror) which came up with a URL to directory containing that file and just edited the url from 'http://' to 'ftp://".

Put all these files into your home directory. You can of course put them anywhere you like but to make these instruction concrete I've described this the way I did it.

Fire up Cygwin and you will be taken to the glass-teletype Window with 'bash' shell with your home directory as your current directory.

Installing binutils

tar xfj binutils-2.13.2.tar.bz2

cd binutils-2.13.2
mkdir objdir
cd objdir

../configure --prefix=/usr/local --target=h8300-hms

make CFLAGS="-O2 -fomit-frame-pointer" all
make install

C:\cygwin\usr\local\bin

Installing gcc and newlib

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

cd ~
tar xfj gcc-core-3.1.1.tar.bz2
tar xfz newlib-1.11.0.tar.gz

Now go to the gcc-3.1.1 directory and create a symbolic link that is used to refer to the 'newlib'.

cd gcc-3.1.1
ln -s ../newlib-1.11.0/newlib .

patch -p1 < ../h8300-hms-gcc-3.1-1.patch

mkdir objdir
cd objdir

../configure --prefix=/usr/local --target=h8300-hms --enable-languages=c --with-newlib

make CFLAGS="-O2 -fomit-frame-pointer" all
make install #this has to be done by root

You can test it by creating a simple C-program:

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
/* nothing much usefull can be done without any knowledge of the target enviroment and I/O */
}

If you save that to file main.c' then you can compile it with the following command:

h8300-hms-gcc main.c

Installing gdb, the GNU debugger

Oh, by the way

time sh ./makeh8sgcc

In my new Fujitsu Celsius laptop (2.4 GHz, 2 MB RAM) it took a litle over 27 minutes to run the script. Your mileage is probably different.

And, yes, all of the above have has been tested several times by copy pasting (to catch typos) the indidual commands from this page to a shell window and also the script run twice in a virgin cygwin and home directory. So it realy should work. I do dislike untested instructions.

Programming Embedded Systems

Cheers, Kusti