General questions about GCC and cross compiling

Question

Recently I've been playing around with cross compiling using GCC and discovered what seems to be a complicated area, tool-chains.

I don't quite understand this as I was under the impression GCC can create binary machine code for most of the common architectures, and all that else really matters is what libraries you link with and what type of executable is created.

Can GCC not do all these things itself? With a single build of GCC, all the appropriate libraries and the correct flags sent to GCC, could I produce a PE executable for a Windows x86 machine, then create an ELF executable for an embedded Linux MIPS device and finally an executable for an OSX PowerPC machine? If not can someone explain how you would achieve this?

Answer 1

With a single build of GCC, all the appropriate libraries and the correct flags sent to GCC, could I produce a PE executable for a Windows x86 machine, then create an ELF executable for an embedded Linux MIPS device and finally an executable for an OSX PowerPC machine? If not can someone explain how you would achieve this?

No. A single build of GCC produces object code for one target architecture. You would need a build targeting Intel x86, a build targeting MIPS, and a build targeting PowerPC. However, the compiler is not the only tool you need, despite the fact that you can build source code into an executable with a single invocation of GCC. Under the hood, it makes use of the assembler (as) and linker (ld) as well, and those need to be built for the target architecture and platform. Usually GCC uses the versions of these tools from the GNU binutils package, so you'd need to build that for the target platform too.

You can read more about building a cross-compiling toolchain here.

I don't quite understand this as I was under the impression GCC can create binary machine code for most of the common architectures

This is true in the sense that the source code of GCC itself can be built into compilers that target various architectures, but you still require separate builds.

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Regarding -march, this does not allow the same build of GCC to switch between platforms. Rather it's used to select the allowable instructions to use for the same family of processors. For example, some of the instructions supported by modern x86 processors weren't supported by the earliest x86 processors because they were introduced later on (such as extension instruction sets like MMX and SSE). When you pass -march, GCC enables all opcodes supported on that processor and its predecessors. To quote the GCC manual:

While picking a specific cpu-type will schedule things appropriately for that particular chip, the compiler will not generate any code that does not run on the i386 without the -march=cpu-type option being used.