Professional GCC support?

[Tom Buskey]

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 10:58 AM, Tyson Sawyer <tyson at j3.org> wrote:

> An excerpt from an email exchange where I work:
>
> > A tool I just found out they spent $9k on (two floating licenses) called
> > IAR says this about language support:
>



> >
> >
> > Obviously there is also GCC for ARM processors. I was told IAR was
> > purchased because management wanted to make sure nothing was
> > holding up <name> in his work with the SAM7x camera controller. I'm told
> > we can get support from IAR when we pay that much, and this does not
> > exist when we decide to use GCC.
>
> It is my belief that that last statement is wrong.  Can anyone point
> me to sources of professional support for GCC/G++ on embedded systems
> and some idea of what the pricing structure might be?  This would be
> for a C/C++ on bare metal environment.  Most of our work is on larger
> processors running Linux, but our "microcontrollers" have only
> recently started to be 32 bit systems that we might prefer to use GCC
> on.
>
> I'm looking for more than "yeah, someone will take your money".  I'm
> looking for something that provides a similar result to what is
> mentioned above.  It would need to be support that keeps us on
> schedules.
>
>
Once upon a time, Cygnus
Solutions<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygnus_Solutions>provided
support.  They got bought by Red Hat and I'd imagine Red Hat will
sell support.  Cygnus also developed Cygwin and the embedded eCOS OS.

FWIW - gcc works well for cross compiling.  You can put your build
environment on Linux or any other Unixen and cross compile for your target
platform.  It should also be easier to switch targets in the future if
you're not dependent on a specific compiler.  I've seen several sites that
"can't switch from SunOS 4.1.x or Solaris 2.6" because their compiler "won't
work" on newer versions of Solaris.
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