Re: attempt at a big-endian debian ARM 'port'
On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 09:21:35AM -0400, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > The 'porting' was actually rather easy so far. I'm not sure what the
> > policy for integrating a new architecture into debian is, but I'm willing
> > to maintain and host the armeb port somewhere myself. Even if the armeb
> > architecture is not officially incorporated, maybe some of the necessary
> > patches for armeb could be merged anyway, which would make the job of
> > maintaining the port even easier.
>
> Do that many packages need patching to work on big endian if they
> already work on little endian arm?
So far: apt, dpkg, gcc, glibc, gmp, linux-kernel-headers, openssl,
strace, xfree86. apt and dpkg for understandable reasons, but also
because apt includes its own (broken) md5 implementation. gmp because
they make incorrect assumptions about floating point formats. The
patches I used are also available on the site.
> > I didn't use any cross toolchain. I started with my Fedora Core 2 port
> > (which also uses gcc 3.3) and then built dpkg, then tried to build all
> > of gcc's dependencies (there are a _lot_ of those) from debian source
> > using dpkg, and I have all of those dependencies satisfied so right now
> > it's trying to build gcc. Once that's done, I'll make a Fedora-free
> > root filesystem and rebuild everything I've built so far.
>
> Well I hope you have a fast machine, that's a lot of stuff to build.
I have enough build power for now.
> > I'm using the debian default float mode, which is hardfloat. I'd also
> > like to use this port on an intel ixp1200 board I have here, which is
> > based on a strongarm (v4) core.
>
> Given how few arm's have an FPU, wouldn't softfloat be more efficient
> than the FPU emulator? It might not be, I don't actually know.
Yes, it would be a lot more efficient.
cheers,
Lennert
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