thank you both for your help. It appears i had a combination of issues yet again that i had to work through (incompatible math lib versions? and bad binutils builds?) but now I think i have a successful cross toolchain.  currently it appears to be linked to the local libs libm.so.6 and libc.so.6 dynamically even though i specified static and used the musl-gcc wrapper but it did successfully build for the target i686-linux-musl

Ironically somehow looking into setting up the /etc/ld-musl-$ARCH.path file led me to notice the issue with the math libs. sleep deprivation however prevents me from remembering that weird thought pattern :-p

thanks again!

On Fri, Oct 10, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Samuel Holland <samuel@sholland.net> wrote:
On October 10, 2014 4:01:10 PM CDT, stephen Turner <stephen.n.turner@gmail.com> wrote:
>As previously mentioned I wiped and installed a clean debian. I did a
>absolute minimum default install no desktop etc compiled the latest
>stable
>musl, m4, gmp, mpfr, mpc, and downloaded gcc 4.7.3 with
>gregorr/musl-cross
>patch to match.

I'm assuming you're using musl-gcc to compile m4, gmp, mpfr, mpc, binutils(!), and gcc.

>Its having a problem finding/using libmpc.so.3 but the paths appear to
>point to the directory which it is located. to be sure i even specified
>using the --with-mpc flag.

You're almost there! All you have to do is tell musl where to find shared libraries. From the documentation:

../etc/ld-musl-$(ARCH).path, taken relative to the location of the "program interpreter" specified in the program's headers - if present, this will be processed as a text file containing the shared library search path, with components delimited by newlines or colons. If absent, a default path of"/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/lib" will be used. Not used by static-linked programs.

You need make that file and put /root/cross/i686-linux-musl/lib in there. You compiled gcc fine, but the new gcc's backend isn't running because it can't find the shared libraries you compiled earlier because they aren't in a standard path.

--
Regards,
Samuel Holland <samuel@sholland.net>