[ARMedslack] Slackware 13.1 and forward is EABI...

[John Oyler]

I'm speaking with an engineer from that company. According to him:

> The only thing is you need to make sure they are OABI and not EABI as the Cavium CPU does not support thumb instructions and therefore it does not support EABI.


I don't know whether this is correct or not. Certainly I ran several binaries from slack 13.1, and they seemed ok, but not knowing much about the instruction set or even how gcc is set up, how can I say when it would bother to use those? On Intel, just because the CPU didn't have SSE didn't mean you couldn't run some binaries compiled with that flag, since those instructions weren't always selected by the compiler. 

I'd like to have Slackware on this thing, rather than debian (ugh), and I'm probably willing to compile my own 13.1 if it comes down to that... but I'd also like to steal the compiler out of 12.2 or whatever to bootstrap back up to it.

John O.

PS The wikipedia page doesn't make it clear whether a Cavium has thumb instructions, but certainly all the other ARM9 families look like they include it. Bleh.

On Jul 19, 2010, at 12:40 PM, Stuart Winter wrote:

> 
>> This should make it incompatible with the Technologic Systems TS-7500
>> which is a Cavium, but binaries seem to run without barfing. Am I just
>> getting luck and choosing those that don't have thumb machine
>> instructions, at least in the path that the code takes when I run them?
> 
> Why do you think EABI binaries won't run?
> As I recall when I was reading the ARM reference manual a while ago, only
> *really* old ARM CPUs don't have the "thumb" feature.
> This one you mention is an ARM9, according to the details I found
> in a brief search.
> 
> root at zaden:~/ac/source/a/u-boot-tools# grep Feat /proc/cpuinfo
> Features        : swp half thumb fastmult edsp
> 
> Does your cpuinfo show "thumb" as a feature?
> 
>> And supposing I can't go with 13.1 (at least without rebuilding it from
>> scratch), what's the latest I can go with? Was there no 13.0?
> 
> 12.2 is the last good old ABI release but it'll be unsupported by the
> end of this month.
> There was no 13.0 release because work on the EABI port started at the
> time 13.0 was released.
> 
> -- 
> Stuart Winter
> Slackware ARM: www.armedslack.org
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