MSPGCC4 - GCC 4.x toolchain for MSP430 MCU

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mspgcc4 is no longer supported. All contributions have been incorporated into mspgcc, which has newer versions of all components.

GCC 4.x toolchain for Texas Instruments MSP430 MCUs

Overview

This site contains the port of the GCC toolchain for the Texas Instruments MSP430 family. The port presented here is the evolution of the original MSPGCC port. While the original MSPGCC project supports only gcc 3.2.3, this site provides GCC 4.x ports. Additionally, a script for automated building of binutils+gcc+gdb+libc is provided.

Versions

mspgcc4 is no longer supported. All contributions have been incorporated into mspgcc, which has newer versions of all components.

The latest supported version of GCC is 4.4.3. The latest GDB is 7.0.1, the latest Insight is 6.8-1.

Version history

18 Feb 2010 Fixed critical and reentrant attributes. R5 was made a general-purpose register, all stack function arguments are accessed via either FP or SP. Several minor bugs were also fixed.

24 Nov 2009 Support for DWARF2 frame unwind information. That makes it possible to debug even the optimized code using latest GDB/Insight. Note that the improved frame detection system will work only for code generated with the latest release of GCC. The older code having no DWARF2 frame info will still be debugged using legacy prologue analyzer.

Building

If you want to build your own binary package, instead of downloading a pre-built one, simply check out the latest revision from our SVN repository and run the buildgcc script:

git clone git://mspgcc4.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/mspgcc4/mspgcc4
cd mspgcc4 && perl buildgcc.pl

The buildgcc.pl script will allow interactively selecting GCC/GDB versions to build. After building, a tarball can be created automatically.

Win32 port

Starting from 18 Feb 2010, MSPGCC4 build for Win32 is based on a patched MinGW framework. The binaries support "c:\\xxx", "c:/xxx", "/c/xxx", "/cygdrive/c/xxx" path forms, do not depend on any frameworks (e.g. cygwin) and do not cause version conflicts.

Advantages

GCC 4.x has several advantages over the old 3.2.3 branch. Here are the most important:

Better optimization. The generated code is typically 7%-10% smaller than code generated by MSPGCC-3.2.3

Better debug info support. The objdump utility displays the mixed assembly/code correctly.

Better C++ and inlining support. Unused local variables are automatically filtered out. Inline functions are implemented in a much more compact way.

Support for various handy features. For example, gcc 4.3 correctly handles the #pragma once statements.

Additionally, the MSPGCC4 port fixes the data-sections bug present in all original MSPGCC versions, allowing using -ffunction-sections and -fdata-sections switches.

GCC now produces DWARF2 frame information precisely specifying. how to find current stack frame at any code location and where were the registers saved. GDB uses this information to build the call stack correctly. Missing frame pointer, high optimization or instruction-level stepping is no longer a problem.

Includes the visual Insight debugger based on GDB.

R5 is no longer used as "argument pointer register". All arguments are always accessed via either FP or SP and R5 is available as a general-purpose register.

More info

To get more information about MSP430 GCC port, see the original mspgcc website.

mspgcc4 is no longer supported. All contributions have been incorporated into mspgcc, which has newer versions of all components.

18 Feb 2010	Fixed critical and reentrant attributes. R5 was made a general-purpose register, all stack function arguments are accessed via either FP or SP. Several minor bugs were also fixed.
24 Nov 2009	Support for DWARF2 frame unwind information. That makes it possible to debug even the optimized code using latest GDB/Insight. Note that the improved frame detection system will work only for code generated with the latest release of GCC. The older code having no DWARF2 frame info will still be debugged using legacy prologue analyzer.