[ELDK] ELDK with x86 target

[Phil Terry]

On Thu, 2008-05-22 at 11:14 -0400, Dave Rensberger wrote:

> 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  with you on that one... not to rip on denx (limited resources etc.
I understand)... but I tried building ELDK from source/modifying
packages in order to use a modified ELDK as our delivery vehicle to our
customers and my experience is that ELDK is intimately tied to the the
host system. I was trying to build on a fedora-6 box and my mandriva
laptop... too many of the packages, while cross-compiled are hacked to
do so, so in fact many of the autoconf configuration tests etc are
probing the host system not your putative target. (The configurations in
the spec files are driving a normal host build using say gcc and relying
on the fact that your path will find the powerpc-linux-gcc cross
compiler but the rest of the configuration testing is just probing your
host... very hacky)
Hence your host system has to be fedora8 based so that the fedora8 based
target works...

I don't have the effort to fix the whole of ELDK so I'm looking at the
effort of just fixing what I need initially and then fixing up more as
customers demand. I'd be happy to feed my "fixes" back up for possible
inclusion but I don't see a quick fix happening anytime soon.

> I'm still not terribly well versed in
> this RPM way of doing things.  I come from the more traditional world of
> embedded development (VxWorks and uClinux), where building a target is
> simply a matter of cross-compiling a bunch of source code from one top
> level makefile.

Just think of RPM as a way of recording what patches and what steps you
had to take to get a package from the internet to compile and run on
your target so that it can be reliably repeated by someone else.

But if you only did a minimal "portablity" exercise, you got it to
compile and run with your one development host and one target, then it
won't work for someone else where some other variable is in the mix. So
what I'm saying is that most of the ELDK components work fine if you
development system is the same as Denx's.

See our earlier thread "Building ELDK from scratch"

Cheers
Phil
> 
>  
> 
> Any thoughts on the best way to do DENX on both of these platforms would
> be appreciated.
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Dave Rensberger
> 
> _______________________________________________
> eldk mailing list
> eldk at lists.denx.de
> http://lists.denx.de/mailman/listinfo/eldk