Building Embedded Linux Systems, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4. Development Tools

Embedded system developers, like other software developers, need compilers, linkers, interpreters, integrated development environments (IDEs), and other such tools. The embedded developer’s tools are different, however, in that they typically run on one platform while building applications for another. This is why these tools are often called cross-platform development tools, or cross-development tools for short.

Importance of a Dedicated Toolchain for Embedded Development

Even if you happen to be using the same architecture on both the development workstation and target board (such as x86 or x86_64), we still recommend using a different toolchain from the native one that comes with the Linux distribution you happen to be running on the development workstation. It is valuable to create a separate toolchain, thus providing a controlled development environment isolated from the workstation environment.

If you don’t create a separate toolchain for the target, opting instead to use the native workstation toolchain, you might find your embedded application broken in subtle (and sometime not so subtle) ways by any future upgrade of the workstation software.

Furthermore, you’ll be prohibited from rebuilding the toolchain with various certain configuration choices that could result in tools that are better optimized for use in embedded environments, such as an alternative C library.

It is therefore highly recommended that you use a custom cross-platform toolchain ...