A GCC Compiler Port For TI's PRU Processor

Written by Michael Larabel in GNU on 15 June 2018 at 03:46 PM EDT. 5 Comments
GNU
Patches exist for taking the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to yet another processor.

The Texas Instruments PRU is a programmable real-time unit made up of two 32-bit RISC cores for both general purpose computing and industrial applications. The PRU is clocked around 200MHz and has full access to the system's internal memory. The TI PRU is found on ARM boards like the Beagle Board series most notably.

Texas Instruments has offered a proprietary toolchain for programming the PRU, but Dimitar Dimitrov has independently worked on a GCC port for the TI PRU processor. There is already GNU Binutils support for the PRU merged while now he has been working on the GCC support, newlib, and simulator handling.


If you happen to have a board that has a TI PRU, you can learn more about this work-in-progress code via this patch series. From the compiler side this new back-end amounts to just over eight thousand lines of code.
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