[armedslack] EABI ?

Sunil Amitkumar Janki psychicistnonconformist at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 18:28:46 UTC 2007


Stuart Winter wrote:


> I've been doing some thinking and ARMedslack probably
> has to move to the new ABI, which essentially means
> starting from scratch once again.
>   


Do you remember my post some time ago about the EABI because
it would accelerate floating point emulation by a factor of 10? Now
it seems it will be reality out of necessity.


> And I could also consider soft vs hard float (although from the bug
> reports in gcc and some others, hard float still seems easier).
>   


A transition like this is always painful so will we have to experience
the same thing again when enabling soft float?

I will be in the same position later this year when Loongson 2F will be
released with full MIPS64R2 compatibility. The current 2E is only MIPS3
compatible so I'm postponing a 64-bit Slackware MIPS release until 2F
systems are available.


> Any thoughts?
> Slackware 12.0 will be released shortly so I might finish up
> to that, and then think about making an EABI version.
> Or I might just skip releasing anything about 12.0 at all and
> just build for EABI now since there's still kde and xap which
> would need rebuilding anyway.
>   


I think it's better to do some kind of release of 12.0 anyway. It
could be the last release that runs on some older hardware
particularly if the old ABI isn't supported anymore in Glibc 2.6
or 2.7.

I have had problems building Qt3/KDE3 with optimisations on
Slackware Current MIPS with GCC 4.1.2 so I have used GCC 3.4.6
for that.

Building these works fine but now I'm finding that libstdc++.so.6.0.3
from GCC 3.4.6 and libstdc++.so.6.0.8 are in conflict with each
other. So at runtime it's one or the other or you will experience
crashes and weird bugs. Maybe I shouldn't build KDE with optimisations
at all.

While seeing all of this I'm thinking of compiling Qt3/KDE3 unoptimised
or statically (if possible) or preferably just going straight to KDE 4
Beta releases. I have also posted a question on the Qt blog asking
whether there will be another release in the Qt3 release series before
it's EOL'ed July 1st, probably not :-( .

Furthermore I have tried to build OpenOffice.org 2.2.1 for MIPS but
I haven't succeeded yet. After figuring this out I'll post the build script
for ARM as well.

Regards,
Sunil






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