Won't build properly with arm-none-eabi-gcc

[iProgramMC]

The version of gcc, binutils etc. that OpeniBoot expects are massively out of date. I had to fire up a Debian 8.7.0 VM and struggle through the apt package archives to get everything working. The OpeniBoot-toolchain (separate repo in the iDroid-Project org) can build on this version, using the host GCC 4.9.2 compiler. I don't know what difference there is between arm-elf-gcc, compiled by the OpeniBoot toolchain, and arm-none-eabi-gcc, which is provided by most modern Linux distros nowadays, but it turns out to be large enough that it won't actually work at all. When you try loadibec-ing it into a new device, it does nothing at all.

This post should serve more as a warning than anything for people who want to compile OpeniBoot in 2026.

[mirh]

The differences seem quite easy to check?

Btw
https://github.com/archeYR/openiBoot
https://github.com/scintill/iDroid-kernel

[nickpack]

The last time there was any active development on this we were building it on Ubuntu 12.04, so it is of little surprise that it won't work with modern compiler toolchains, or that packages and patches for the original toolchain are missing.

I didn't realise that anybody was still building this stuff, it has been dead for many years.

[iProgramMC]

So if I got this right, apparently I'm the first in years to try and compile this thing? That's kinda insane. You'd expect more interest given that it seems to me that old iOS devices are rising in popularity lately...

[nickpack]

@iProgramMC Most of the code in this repo was last edited 15 years ago, that should probably go some way to explain how very much dead this project is.

[mirh]

#51