Automatic Link Editor Generation for Embedded CPU Cores

SoC design space exploration requires code generation for several CPU core alternatives. However, an embedded software code generation toolkit cannot be developed from scratch for every target CPU under exploration. Nor can it always be reused from standard packages, especially when the CPU core is an ASIP. That’s why automatically retargetable tools are required. This paper describes a retargetable technique for link editor automatic generation from a formal description of the target CPU core. The implementation of the technique relies on the well-known GNU binutils package. To make it retargetable, the key is to reuse the architecture-independent libraries and automatically generate the architecture-dependent ones. The technique’s correctness and robustness were verified for three target CPUs (MIPS, SPARC and PowerPC) running programs from the benchmark MiBench. For experimental validation, we have successfully compared the executable files produced by the generated tools to those produced by conventional tools from the GNU binutils package.