Overview

The Kenge build system tries to provide known working versions of most of the tools required to build a bootable image, and these are compiled by the build system when required. There are however some external dependencies required.

This document describes which external tools you need and how to get them.

Python

The majority of the build scripts are written in the excellent scripting language Python. Many operating systems come with python installed. The minimum version required is Python 2.3. We plan on supporting this version going forward, although we will also ensure forward compatability with new version of python.

Python can be downloaded from the Python website.

SCons

We use the SCons build system. Unfortunately it is slightly trickier to maintain compatability between different version of SCons. The currenty minimum required is version 0.96.1. As with Python we will attempt to be forward compatible with newer versions.

SCons can be downloaded from the SCons website.

Toolchains

We currently rely on the gcc toolchains. To compile Kenge projects such as Iguana natively on ia32, use a standard native compiler. In this case, the compiler must be gcc-3.3. Later versions of gcc will not accept the ia32 headers. Support for more compilers is at a high priority for coming releases. If you have gcc-3.3 installed but running gcc defaults to another version (check with gcc --version) then you will probably need to set tool suffixes, see the build system documentation for further details.

To compile for other architectures, such as ARM and MIPS, a cross compiler is needed. Obtaining cross compilers can be tricky, so we make available binary copies of gcc-3.4.4 which run on linux-ia32 and compile for arm and mips64. See the prebuilt binaries page.

If you are building on Windows for ARM the Cygwin toolchains from GNUARM are recommended.

If you need or want to compile your own toolchain we suggest that you use crosstool.

The basic steps involved are:

1. Download crosstool. Eg: wget http://kegel.com/crosstool/crosstool-0.28-rc32.tar.gz
2. Extract. Eg: tar zxvf crosstool-0.28-rc32.tar.gz
3. Edit demo-arm-softfloat.sh. Uncomment the gcc-3.3.3 line.
4. Edit arm-softfloat.dat. Set TARGET=arm-linux.
5. Create build directory. sudo mkdir /opt; sudo chown $USER /opt
6. Run tool. sh demo-arm-softfloat.sh
7. Get coffee, it takes a while to build...

Simulators

If you want to run the built targets in a simulated environment (which, as a first step, is strongly recommended!), then you will also need a simulator. See the supported simulators page for more information.