3.4 Libraries

This describes newlib, a freely available libc replacement. Most applications use calls in the standard C library. When initially linking in libc.a, several I/O functions are undefined. If you don’t plan on doing any I/O, then you’re OK, otherwise they need to be created. These routines are read, write, open, close. sbrk, and kill. Open & close don’t need to be fully supported unless you have a filesystems, so typically they are stubbed out. Kill is also a stub, since you can’t do process control on an embedded system.

Sbrk() is only needed by applications that do dynamic memory allocation. It’s uses the symbol _end that is setup in the linker script. It also requires a compile time option to set the upper size limit on the heap space. This leaves us with read and write, which are required for serial I/O. Usually these two routines are written in C, and call a lower level function for the actual I/O operation. These two lowest level I/O primitives are inbyte() and outbyte(), and are also used by GDB back ends if you’ve written an exception handler. Some systems also implement a havebyte() for input as well.

Other commonly included functions are routines for manipulating LED’s on the target (if they exist) or low level debug help. Typically a putnum() for printing words and bytes as a hex number is helpful, as well as a low-level print() to output simple strings.

As libg++ uses the I/O routines in libc.a, if read and write work, then libg++ will also work with no additional changes.