#codesourcery

Step 2. Once you have chosen your toolchain its important to give a read to its documentation and find out what things are what in it. How do i invoke the compiler, linker and assembler, what are the roles of these different tools, and how can i inter-convert between the final executable file format i am targetting. Read this. and this. Knowing a few compiler flags and their purpose is important. 

Step 3. Get your C right. Since most of embedded development happens on C its good to run through a C refresher course on the side while you are doing steps 1 and 2. Basics of C, including Structures, Pointers and functions calling is important. Don't forget reading about the role of .c and .h files in any code. Small things go a long way in avoiding a lot of frustrating moments ahead. See this and this.

Once done, I would recommend using Eclipse (C/C++) as an IDE and integrating all of your stuff there. By stuff i mean integrating all your source code and compiler. You'll need to install an Eclipse plugin also for integrating your toolchain with the IDE. So now, here is a brief description of some generic steps you'd follow to set your own generic microcontroller development environment,

File -> New C Project, gets you this,

Click on 'Finish' on the next screen. 

Once done, you need to get into the details and open the properties of this project. This will be screen under C/C++ Build, 

Define your compiler symbols under Cross GCC Compiler -> Symbols. 

Include your Compiler Include paths under 'Includes', 

Set optimizations in the link under 'Includes'. 

Set all your other compiler specific flags under 'Miscellanous'. This is what i set for building Stellaris TI ARM based Microcontroller code,

-fpack-struct -fshort-enums -ffunction-sections -fdata-sections -Wall -Wa,-adhlns="[email protected]" -c -fmessage-length=0 -mcpu=cortex-m3 -mthumb -g3 -gdwarf-2

I leave finding out the meaning of all these flags to you. The compiler documentation covers them. 

You now need to enter the location of the linker file and any libraries (with paths) which your code would use. To define the location of the linker file, look under the Miscellaneous tab under Cross GCC Linker 

-T"/home/cuil/workspace/arm/ti/official_package/firmware_development_package/boards/stellaris-guru/example_lm3s608/main.ld" -Xlinker --gc-sections

Define the libraries under the 'Libraries' section. Its important to understand what libraries are and how they help in the linking process. Libraries are basically an archive of the object files created during compilation. You do not need to include the source of the functions if you are including the libary directly into your code.

Thats it you are done. This is the generic way of building code targeting hardware.