Dear Roman,
In message 40a670230809112359j4c1d9cf1p56afc8114b81bf6d@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
There are numerous toolchains and kits out there -- head's spinning. ELDK is one of them. In my understanding ELDK focuses on PowerPC architecture, but toolchains for ARM/MIPS architectures are also
In theory, ELDK supports ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC likewise. Relaity is that we are customer driven, and normally new versions get ported PowerPC first, then ARM, and finally MIPS. You can see this right now: the PowerPC has been out for a couple of months, ARM is still a few weeks away, and MIPS also.
available. How reasonable is it to take it and use it for, let's say, ARM9 based platform ?
It's perfectly reasonable. We use only the ELDK four our work, on all ARM, MIPS, and PowerPC systems.
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 :-)
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk