[U-Boot-Users] Advice about a problem compiling with alternative toolchain

[Wolfgang Denk]

In message <41BF1344.7020103 at wiline.com> you wrote:
> 
>     So, I now wanted to try and compile the bootloader using a version 
> of gcc greater or equal to 3.3. Maybe this is a bad idea but I was 

It is not a bad idea - it should work fine.  ELDK  release  3.1  uses
GC-3.3.3, and this works fine.

> curious. Anyway the compilation seemed to go fine but producing the 
> srec, "objcopy --gap-fill=0xff -O srec u-boot u-boot.srec", resulted in 
> the objcopy application being stuck in a long loop and eating up a 
> significant amount of system memory. Apparently it had caculated that

I've seen this before. It happened for the ERIC  board.  The  problem
was  that  the  TEXT_BASE  definition  for  the ERIC board was set to
0xFFFE0000 while the resultant code  and  data  size  of  U-Boot  was
bigger  than  the 0x20000 bytes. This confused the linker and objcopy
because the memory address of the last  portion  of  the  image  goes
beyond the 0xFFFFFFFF value causing an overflow of a 32-bit variable.

The easiest way to solve the problem for this particular board was to
change the TEXT_BASE definition to a lower  value,  for  instance  to
0xFFFC0000.

> output of the compiler is different than what should be expected. I know 
> an easy solution would be to use the ELDK in place of the current 
> toolchain but I'm more interested in understanding what is going wrong.  

Check if it's really a toolchain problem, or just a  misconfiguration
for your board.

For  example,  try  if  you  can   build   other   (standard)   board
configurations using your toolchain.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

-- 
Software Engineering:  Embedded and Realtime Systems,  Embedded Linux
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