Building the MSP430 toolchain on Mac OS X / Most *nix'es

For a consulting project recently I was in need of an msp430 toolchain to use with the msp430f2001. Getting a working toolchain proved to be a bit of trial and error, since the official documentation for building an mspgcc toolchain is very out of date. The following instructions will show you how to build binutils-2.18, gcc-3.2.3, msp430-libc and gdb 6.8 for the msp430, hosted on Mac OS X. These instructions are also very applicable to building on other *nix systems; just skip the Mac OS X specific sections.

NOTE**: These instructions do NOT build any JTAG tools for the MSP. This is because all the jtag tools are dependant on a binary-blob driver from TI, which is only available for windows or linux. I'm looking at options for working around this, such as WINE, but so far, no luck. There appears to be an incompatibility between Parallels VM and the TI USB FET tools, so virtualizing a guest os to run the GDB proxy doesn't work either in my tests. I currently run msp430-gdbproxy on a windows laptop, and connect to it with GDB over the network.

NOTE***: mspgcc provides a global makefile in packaging/. This may or may not build a complete toolchain on OSX; I haven't tried it, but I suspect not because gcc would bomb due to the bad config.gcc check. I found the makefile after figuring out these build instructions, and in any case, I prefer having a bit more control over my build process.

These steps also available in convenient script form: build_mspgcc_osx.sh

Precompiled binaries for 10.5.5 Intel 32bit, --prefix=/opt/msp430/: msp430_osx_toolchain.tar.bz2

1. Preparation / MSPGCC Checkout
   1. cd /path/to/working/directory
   2. cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@mspgcc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mspgcc login
   3. cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@mspgcc.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/mspgcc co -P gcc/gcc-3.3 packaging msp430-libc
   4. mkdir -p build/
   5. cd build
2. Setup some handy variables
   1. export PREFIX=/opt/msp430/ substitute whichever install path you'd like
   2. export TARGET=msp430
   3. export CFGSTR="--prefix=${PREFIX} --target=${TARGET} --disable-nls"Disable NLS is optional; it reduces compile times, and I don't need any translations
   4. export PATH=${PATH}:${PREFIX}/bin
3. Building Binutils
   1. curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/binutils/binutils-2.18.tar.bz2
   2. tar -xjf binutils-2.18.tar.bz2
   3. cd binutils-2.18
   4. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/binutils-2.18-14x1-20x1-20x2-20x3-22x4-42x-42x0-461x.patch
   5. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/binutils-2.18-msp430x24x-msp430x26x.patch
   6. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/binutils-ld_scripts.patch
   7. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/binutils-2.18-430X.patch
   8. ./configure $CFGSTR
   9. make
   10. make install
   11. cd ..
4. Building GCC
   1. curl -O ftp://mirrors.usc.edu/pub/gnu/gcc/gcc-3.2.3/gcc-core-3.2.3.tar.bz2
   2. curl -O http://www.carnelec.com/msp_osx/gcc_3.2.3_i686_darwin_thunk.patch [this patch is a hack, but it works. Only necessary on OSX / intel]
   3. tar -xjf gcc-core-3.2.3.tar.bz2
   4. cp -r ../gcc/gcc-3.3/{gcc,include,config*} gcc-3.2.3/
   5. cd gcc-3.2.3
   6. patch -p1 < ../gcc_3.2.3_i686_darwin_thunk.patch
   7. ./configure $CFGSTR
   8. make
   9. make install
   10. cd ..
5. Building msp430-libc
   1. cp -r ../msp430-libc .
   2. curl -O http://www.carnelec.com/msp_osx/msp430_libc_tlv_prefix_fix.patch
   3. cd msp430-libc/
   4. patch -p1 < ../msp430_libc_tlv_prefix_fix.patch
   5. cd src/
   6. make
   7. make install
   8. cd ..
6. Building GDB
   1. curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb/gdb-6.8.tar.bz2
   2. tar -xjf gdb-6.8.tar.bz2
   3. cd gdb-6.8
   4. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/msp430-gdb-6.8.patch
   5. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/msp430-gdb-6.8-fix.patch
   6. patch -p1 < ../../packaging/patches/gdb-6.8-430X.patch
   7. ./configure $CFGSTR
   8. make
   9. make install
   10. cd ..

I wrote a script that tested compiling a basic program [ just WDTCTL=0 ] for each of the -mmcu settings that gcc claimed to support. The results are listed below. The fails appear to be due to an incomplete device header in msp430-libc