On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 3:07 PM, stimits@comcast.net wrote:

also have some prebuilt 5.2 and 5.3 binaries, plus a few other 4.8 and 4.9 compilers from quite some time back. I've used these for building a Linux 3.10 kernel, and the newer linaro-6.1 fails during kernel compile. The issue seems to be the assembler does not recognize option "-EL" (all of the ARM systems I'm building for are little endian, I've not seen a big endian system).

Embedded toolchains are frequently multilibbed for big/little endian, but linux toolchains are not. There is no convention for having both big and little endian glibc installs on a system, and no convention for having both big and little endian system call entry points in the kernel. So for a linux toolchain, you have to choose whether it is big or little at configure time with the target triplet, and you can't change it after configure time. arm is little endian by default, and armeb is big-endian. Similarly, aarch64 is little endian and aarch64_be is big-endian.

If you are getting assembler errors for -EL and/or -EB, then you probably aren't using an arm/aarch64 assembler. You are probably accidentally using an x86 assembler instead. Try adding a -v option to the gcc command to check what assembler is being used, and try adding a -Wa,v option to get verbose info from the assembler which will tell you what it was configured for.

You mentioned earlier that you didn't bother building binutils, this might be why gcc is failing after the install. Binutils is pretty easy to configure and build compared to gcc, and bugs in binutils are rare compared to gcc, so there is no reason to skip the binutils build when doing a toolchain build. This is likely to cause more problems than it avoids. Just be sure to use the same configure options for binutils that you use for gcc, and configure/build/install binutils before you configure/build/install gcc.

Jim