[ELDK] ELDK with x86 target

Dave Rensberger David.Rensberger at ambientcorp.com
Thu May 22 18:27:27 CEST 2008


Wolfgang,

Thanks for your quick response.  I'd love to help you start an x86
target project, but unfortunately my company's x86 product is a legacy
product that we may never even need to upgrade.   Given that, it's hard
to justify the effort that would be required to create a real cross
compilation environment, so I think I'll probably go with the
quick-and-dirty approach of building Fedora 8 packages on a Fedora 8
host.

Also, when you say that 4.2 is based on Fedora 8, I assume that you're
referring to the packages that make up the ELDK4.2, but not the
environment to build ELDK4.2, right?   My experience from the past few
days has lead me to believe that if you want to build ELDK4.2 from
scratch, you're still best to go back to a Fedora 5 distro.  I'm not
sure I have any reason to build from scratch anyway...  I think I
immediately jumped in and tried to do that because of my "traditional"
embedded build process mindset.

Thanks,
--Dave

-----Original Message-----
From: wd at denx.de [mailto:wd at denx.de] 
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2008 12:05 PM
To: Dave Rensberger
Cc: eldk at lists.denx.de
Subject: Re: [ELDK] ELDK with x86 target

Dear Dave,

in message
<B7BC4CB64CA090478F283BA589292737175C87 at abtg-mail.ambientcorp.com> you
wrote:
> 
> This seems like it might be a common question, but I couldn't find
> anything in the archives.

The mailing list is not that old yet. But you are right, this is a
reoccurring question.

> I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts or experience in trying to
use
> the DENX RPM's on x86.   I realize that I could just go get the
> analogous Fedora 4 RPMs, compile them using the host compiler on a
> Fedora 4 distro, and effectively have the same thing, but I'd really
> prefer to do this in a way that's more similar to how we'll be
building
> the PPC distro.  

Note that ELDK 4.2 is based on Fedora 8, so that could be your base
for such work (and actually this is what we would recommend in such a
situation).

But I am well aware that a controlled toolchain environment like  the
ELDK has it's advantages even for x86 host / x86 target combinations.
Like  in  so  many  other  cases it's the effort that stopped us from
providing such a version yet - respective customers who  needed  this
so  urgently  that  they  would  be  willing  to  cover at least some
significant part of this effort.

The alternative would  be  to  start  such  a  version  as  community
project; I'd be happy about such a thing.

> I guess I'd ideally like to build the x86 target with a cross
complier,
> even though the target and the host are both x86-linux.  It just seems
> like cross-compiling will insulate the build process from the
> configuration of the host machin, but maybe I'm just being stodgy and
> "old-fasioned" on this issue...I'm still not terribly well versed in

I think you have perfectly good reasons for such an approach.

> Any thoughts on the best way to do DENX on both of these platforms
would
> be appreciated.

The quick and easy way to get something that is pretty close to  ELDK
4.2 is to install Fedora 8, eventually under some emulation/virtuali-
zation layer like qemu or so.

Or we try and start an x86 port of ELDK as community project.



Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
DENX Software Engineering GmbH,     MD: Wolfgang Denk & Detlev Zundel
HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany
Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd at denx.de
History tends to exaggerate.
	-- Col. Green, "The Savage Curtain", stardate 5906.4


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