Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Roman,
In message 40a670230809112359j4c1d9cf1p56afc8114b81bf6d@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
[snip]
How necessary is it to install ELDK in order to be able to compile U-Boot for non-PPC platform?
It's not necessary. You can use any other (decent) tool chain as well. The nice thing with the ELDk is that it comes ready-to-use, well tested, and in indentical versions for ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC. And it's not only a cross tool chain, but also the native run time environment which will come in handy once you got U-Boot running and go forward to porting Linux :-)
To chime in 2c from rumor an innuendo (and some actual experience), some of the cross compilation tool builds are actually scripts that pull down sources from internet sites and apply patches (also pulled down from internet sites) to those sources. This is done every time you build the cross tools. You do not control the sources/patches.
While this is excellent for staying up to date (bleeding edge) on the cross tool environment, the downside is that you cannot go back and re-create a given cross tool environment because yesterdays build may use a different version of the sources/patches than todays build.
ELDK is a well packaged binary distribution (with full source available) that can be archived and (re)installed at any time in the future with predictable results.
It also captures all the sources necessary to recreate a given version so you can rebuild version 4.0[1] and have it match the version 4.0 you used months/years ago. For some uses, this doesn't matter. For long term business use where you may have to reinstall your tool set long after it has been declared "obsolete", this is a vital difference.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
Thanks to denx.de for providing the ELDK, gvb
[1] Theoretically ;-). Rebuilding from source in practice may be challenging.