[armedslack] EABI

[David F. Carlson]

According to Stuart Winter:
> 
> Slackware ARM is built for the lowest denominator on the market
> which is "armv4".  I did consider using armv5 but there are so many
> devices which would be excluded, that I decided to set the base at armv4.
> The Kernels are always optomised for the specific device, and my
> thoughts are that if someone wants to, they can rebuild some of the
> userspace stuff using -march=armv5 pretty easily.

Stuart,

The hassle with this (if I am correct) is that the EABI supports FPE and VFP -- but at compile time only.

The glibc either builds the setjmp, fp_context.h, etc. to work with "old" float or new float.  "The" EABI is really 2 ABIs.

So, the armv4 EABI precludes running on armv6 (and would thus not be terribly useful (to me!).

What the handheld.org folks do is build 3 Ubuntu variants:

armv5el
armv5el-vfp
armv6el-vfp

That is a lot of work though...

Are there any other vfp people on the list that will be "lost" if the armedslack is fpe only?


David F. Carlson    Chronolytics, Inc.  Rochester, NY
mailto:dave at chronolytics.com            http://www.chronolytics.com

"The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll