Building a GCC cross compiler from scratch is a very tedious task. The process consists of a quite high number of undocumented steps, and mostly relies on the users' experience. Fortunately a community sharing its experience, the crossgcc mailing list, actively supports a tool, crosstool-NG, that considerably simplifies the process of building a GCC cross compiler.

1. Get crosstool-NG

Download the crosstool-NG archive (e.g crosstool-ng-1.13.2.tar.bz2) from this page.

2. Uncompress crosstool-NG archive

3. Configure crosstool-NG

4. Compile crosstool-NG

5. Customize your own gcc cross compiler build

The crosstool-NG user interface enables customizing the cross-tool chain to build. It means that you can choose and configure:

• the C/C++ compiler,
• the C Library (either glibc, eglibc, newlib),
• the target processor (e.g. PowerPC or ARM),
• the operating system (e.g. Linux),
• the debug facilities (e.g. a debugger),
• etc.

On exit, at the question "Do you wish to save your new crosstool-NG configuration?", answer "Yes".

Crosstool-NG cross compiler configuration menu

Crosstool-NG cross compiler configuration saving

This will create a file named ".config" within the crosstool-NG directory.

6. Build your custom gcc cross compiler