Validating your GNU platform toolchain: tips and techniques

Mark Mitchell and Anil Khanna, Mentor Graphics
EETimes (9/30/2011 8:04 PM EDT)

Open-source tools for your open-source Android/Linux platform.

In the past few years we've seen the embedded design community move away from proprietary software development tools and move decisively closer to open-source software (OSS) development.

As one would expect, accompanying this shift is an increased demand for proven, top-quality OSS tools. For embedded systems developers designing for embedded Linux, the GNU toolchain is the most popular choice due to its standing as the natural toolchain of the Linux kernel community.*

So how do you obtain a GNU toolchain? You can opt to purchase a commercial toolchain from an established vendor or you may decide to build the toolchain yourself. Successfully building a GNU toolchain, while a significant achievement, is only half the work. Meaningfully testing and validating to ensure the production-worthiness of your toolchain, is the critical second half.

With its massive codebase of 10 million lines or more, adequately testing the GNU toolchain can pose a mammoth task, as illustrated by Table 1. It's vital to create a methodical validation strategy to achieve maximal testing of the various components.

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