Baselibc

Baselibc is a very simple libc for embedded systems geared primarily for 32-bit microcontrollers in the 10-100kB memory range. The library of basic system calls and facilities compiles to less than 5kB total on Cortex-M3, and much less if some functions aren’t used.

The code is based on klibc and tinyprintf modules, and licensed under the BSD license.

Baselibc comes from https://github.com/PetteriAimonen/Baselibc.git

Description

Mynewt OS can utilize libc which comes with compiler (e.g. newlib bundled with some binary distributions of arm-none-eabi-gcc). However, you may choose to replace the libc with baselibc for a reduced image size. Baselibc optimizes for size rather than performance, which is usually a more important goal in embedded environments.

How to switch to baselibc

In order to switch from using libc to using baselibc you have to add the baselibc pkg as a dependency in the project pkg. Specifying this dependency ensures that the linker first looks for the functions in baselibc before falling back to libc while creating the executable. For example, project boot uses baselibc. Its project description file boot.yml looks like the following:

project.name: boot
project.identities: bootloader
project.pkgs:
        - libs/os
        - libs/bootutil
        - libs/nffs
        - libs/console/stub
        - libs/util
        - libs/baselibc

List of Functions

Documentation for libc functions is available from multiple places. One example are the on-line manual pages at FreeBSD website.

baselibc supports most libc functionality; malloc(), printf-family, string handling, and conversion routines.

There is some limited functionality and support for floating point numbers and ‘long long’, but contributions are always welcome!