[ELDK] Changing kernel in ELDK-4.2

Wolfgang Denk wd at denx.de
Tue Sep 2 10:16:27 CEST 2008


Dear Robert,

In message <7e63f56c0809012229n70650aadjf4805a57ecd25cd6 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> 
> What is your opinion about somehow customizing LTIB (linux target image
> builder) script for building
> rootfs?

Well, the sort answer to this question is the existence of  the  ELDK
itself.  If we were happy with using LTIB ourself, we'd stop spending
he (huge!) efforts of developing and maintaining ELDK.

There are many approaches (usually with only slight technical  diffe-
rences)  around  that  build root file systems by rebuilding from the
original tarballs: LTIB, ptxdist, buildroot, ..., and  many  projects
added their own variants of these.

One of the problems with all these approaches is  the  complexity  of
the build system which you have to deal with whenever you want to add
a  piece of code. [We have the same complexity of the build system in
ELDK, but we build it only once, and most of the users never re-build
the ELDK from scratch - usually, you can just  use  the  pre-compiled
libraries and binaries.]

Another problem of all these systems is that they come  only  with  a
relatively  small  set  of target tools - check how many of these for
example include make, binutils and gcc as target packages.  The  ELDK
comes  with  a  pretty  extensive target build environment, so if you
have some package that is difficult to  adapt  for  cross-compilation
you  can usually build it with little effort on the target (configure
+ make + make install) and  then  again  just  use  the  pre-compiled
binaries.


I'm using ELDK because I feel that it saves me from waiting  for  the
same builds again and again and again.

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
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