[U-Boot] Testing report for i.MX51 using Linaro/Ubuntu gcc 4.6.3 (from Precise repositories), libgcc, etc.

[Matt Sealey]

Marek Vasut insists I report this to the list, so here goes;

Compiling a U-Boot for i.MX51 here (for the Efika MX) basically
doesn't operate well. Among other things, we got data aborts in
several places, most annoyingly sometime after boot_relocate_fdt. This
was using a 64-bit Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04) installation, the
standard "arm-linux-gnueabi-gcc-4.6" (4.6.3-1ubuntu5) compiler and
other toolchain components (no modifications made).

Using USE_PRIVATE_LIBGCC=yes solved the issues, as did changing to the
gcc 4.4.7 (4.4.7-1ubuntu2) and using either private libgcc or the one
provided by the toolchain.

This is not the first problem we've ever had with the Linaro gcc
toolchain, especially not with 4.6. So far, reverting to building
using gcc 4.4.7 has solved all the problems, and we're using
USE_PRIVATE_LIBGCC by default now anyway because I don't see the point
in using the one provided with the toolchain if it is such a huge
unknown and U-Boot provides a compatible feature anyway.

I'm not sure what anyone on the list is going to make of this or if it
influences some design decisions anywhere else in U-Boot, just that I
was nagged incessantly to "report my findings" - we all knew the
Linaro compiler generally sucks already, though, right?

-- 
Matt Sealey <matt at genesi-usa.com>
Product Development Analyst, Genesi USA, Inc.