On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
You can certainly run armel, armhf and armWhateverYouNameIt in chroots
on an i.MX53 (I have helped with armel issues while running armhf using
chroots and it works fine since the armhf kernel can run everything).
Useful to know the kernel is independent from the ABI. I would have thought that wouldn't be the case, but I guess it makes sense as user code doesn't directly 'call' the kernel. It's been 25+ years since I've had my OS classes.
Both involve work. If any packages in armhf specifically have assembly
that requires thumb2 or something similar, then you could have some
tricky stuff to fix. The other option would be more focused on specific
packages or libraries. Certainly there is overhead in armel's calling
convention even when using hardware floating point, but it would be much
less work to officially get packages included in official debian armel
I believe. So the HWCaps + armel would be less work longterm I would
think.
Of course if the pi really takes off, maybe it could justify a new
official port.
I guess the other consideration is what the product lifetime for the current version of the RPi might be. Easy to imagine a new version coming out in 12 months with an upgraded Broadcom SoC that would meet the default armhf specs. That would quickly obsolete any v6 efforts with regards to the RPi.
Well that would also be true for people running i686 machines, and
they aren't being catered to that way. There are a lot more of those.
Hmm, good point.