All,
Thanks to Wolfgang and Alexander who offered help offline in order to track down the issue. Currently we know that the ELDK 4.2 toolchain "works" and the CodeSourcery 4.4.1 (arm-2010q1-202) "does not work".
A preliminary test of both the ELDK and the CS toolchains on a small program which uses one each of const, initialized and uninitialized globals shows that while the EABI version has moved from 4 to 5, and the code generator has changed, both toolchains generate the same number of relocations for the same locations, albeit in a different order; so at least we know that all required fixups are present with both chains.
On u-boot, the overall number of relocations is smaller with the CS toolchain but apparently this is due to the code generator generating less literals per function.
Tomorrow (sorry : later this morning) I'll build the OpenRD binaries with both toolchains and test it.
Meanwhile, I would still like Alexander to add printf()s to then nand init functions so that we know at which address they think they nand_chip should be written to, and compare that to the printf() that shows at which address nand_chip is supposed to be read.
Amicalement,