Re: Difficulty cross-compiling

[John Calcote]

Hi William,

On 10/12/2009 12:26 PM, William Tracy (wtracy) wrote:
> I'm trying to cross-compile a library that uses GNU Autotools (Google
> Coredumper, to be specific) for PPC using the MontaVista tool chain. The
> sequence of commands I'm following is:
>
> $ ./configure --host=ppc CC=/path/to/gcc CXX=/path/to/g++
>
> $ make
>
> $ [next step would normally be "make install"]
>
> For a normal (not cross-compile) configuration, issuing "make" causes a
> .libs/ directory to be generating containing .a, .o, and .so files (and
> variants thereof). When I cross-compile for PPC, the directory is
> created and populated with a .a file, but no .so files. I can see .o and
> .lo files being generated, so the code *is* getting compiled, but the
> linking stage gets skipped. When I review the make output, there are no
> error messages or warnings-the commands related to the .so files are
> simply missing.
>    

You don't state your target OS, only the CPU architecture, and I'm not 
familiar with MontaVista, so I'm not sure I'm helping here. But if your 
target platform is AIX, or anything like it, you may be experiencing 
AIX-library-naming-difference syndrome - a sense of disorientation 
associated with not being able to find your AIX shared libraries after 
building. ;-)

The default library extension for some versions of AIX is .a. These .a 
files contain the equivalent of standard Unix static /and dynamic/ 
libraries. Thus, on AIX/PPC, .a files are dynamically loaded just like 
.so files on Solaris or Linux. The .a files also contain the static 
objects linked into a binary when static linking is requested.

Regards,
John