Mac OS X

The tools you need are similar to the tools listed in the Linux instructions, but we will need to build a cross compiler in order to get things working. This is sort of complicated and boring, but we've done some of that boring work for you so you can get up and running quickly.

Make sure you have homebrew installed because you are going to need it to install some of the tools. You are probably also going to need Xcode if you don't already have it. You may have to agree to the Xcode license before you use it. You can do this by either opening Xcode and accepting the license agreement, or by running sudo xcodebuild -license in the terminal, scrolling down to the bottom of the license, and agreeing to it.

Download this script and read through it. There are a couple assumptions that it makes about the paths where the source is downloaded to and where the binaries are installed. You might want to change where those locations are. When possible we try and use brew to install things, but there are some programs we need to compile. The compiled special versions of the tools are installed in ~/opt. This is so we don't clobber any version of them that you may have already installed. The source code for these tools are downloaded in ~/src.

Here is what the script does:

1. brew install tools that it can like gmp, mpfr, libmpc, autoconf, and automake
2. Download and compile tools in order to make a cross compiler: binutils, gcc, objconv
3. Download and compile grub using the cross compiler

This might take some time to run.

After it is done you should have all the tools you need located in ~/opt. The tools should be named the same as the tools used in other chapters, but they might be prefixed with a x86_64-pc-elf-. The exception to this is grub. The default path for the binaries installed using the above script is $HOME/opt/bin so adjust the PATH variable appropriately.