When building for the synthetic Linux target, the resulting binaries are native Linux applications with the HAL providing suitable bindings between the eCos kernel and the Linux kernel.
Note: Please be aware that the current implementation of the Linux synthetic target does not allow thread-aware debugging.
These Linux applications cannot be run on a Windows system. However, it is possible to write a similar HAL emulation for the Windows kernel if such a testing target is desired.
For the synthetic target, eCos relies on features not available in native compilers earlier than gcc-2.95.1. It also requires version 2.9.5 or later of the GNU linker. If you have gcc-2.95.1 or later and ld version 2.9.5 or later, then you do not need to build new tools. eCos does not support earlier versions. You can check the compiler version using gcc -v and the linker version using ld -v.
If you have native tools that are sufficiently recent for use with eCos, you should be aware that by default eCos assumes that the tools i686-pc-linux-gnu-gcc, i686-pc-linux-gnu-ar, i686-pc-linux-gnu-ld, and i686-pc-linux-gnu-objcopy are on your system and are the correct versions for use with eCos. But instead, you can tell eCos to use your native tools by editing the configuration value "Global command prefix" (CYGBLD_GLOBAL_COMMAND_PREFIX) in your eCos configuration. If left empty (i.e. set to the empty string) eCos will use your native tools when building.
If you have any difficulties, it is almost certainly easiest overall to rebuild the tools as described on: http://ecos.sourceware.org/getstart.html