Status of the Xtensa Port

Xtensa Support in OpenSource Software

Unlike applications that are mostly written architecture-independent, development tools and operating systems must be ported to a new processor architecture. Support for the Xtensa architecture has already been integrated to most Open Source software. Development trees that feed to the respective mainline repository and for new development can be found in local GIT repositories

Toolchain: Compiler (GCC) and various binary utilities (binutils)

GNU toolchain tools are maintained in OpenSource and can be downloaded from the respective locations.

C-Libraries: GLIBC and uClibc

Xtensa has long been part of uClibc, however, there are a lot of bug fixes pending the next release (0.9.33.3). Support for the Native Posix Thread Library (NTPL) is under development and is expected to be part of the following release. Development for Glibc with NPTL (older thread libraries are not supported by Glibc anymore) is also current under way. A development branch can be found in local GIT repositories.

Debugging

GDB is also maintained in OpenSource and can be downloaded from [[1]]. Support for other debugging tools (strace, ltrace, oprofile, etc.) has not been pushed to their respective main repository. Patches have been included in local buildroot repositories.

Linux kernel

Xtensa has been part of the official Linux kernel tree since 2.6.13. For the latest version, see also Internet_Resources

Toolchain and root-fs generators: crosstool-NG, buildroot

Xtensa is supported by buildroot and can be downloaded from [[2]]. Support for crosstool-NG has not been pushed into the official tree yet. A version can be downloaded from local GIT repositories