On 18/05/2012 21:26, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
Except I’m wondering if FreeMiNT (userspace) will get shared libraries some day. It would help Debian GNU/MiNT ☺
On FreeMiNT, there is shared library support through the SLB mechanism (and also LDG, another one). Both are very few used. I'm not sure they are generic enough to allow compiling generic GNU sources without deep changes.
That would need to be addressed during porting, sure. We basically need a userspace CPU switch between: - 68020+ or CF, no distinguishing needed (generic mode)
Henk Robbers did that in his AHCC compiler. And it works fine. The binaries can run on both 68020+ and ColdFire.
GCC could probably do the same when configured for the ColdFire 5200 target. I carefully avoided to do that since I provide 68000, 68020+FPU and ColdFire libraries with my cross-tools, so people just have to recompile their software to get fully optimized libraries.
Note that while the ColdFire brings very few new instructions in for userland, it lacks a lot of 68000 instructions and addressing modes. So a compatible binary is almost optimal for ColdFire, but really suboptimal for 68020.
- some as-of-yet unspecified CF baseline (generic)
ColdFire V4e is a good choice. It is available on the FireBee and several evaluation boards. It also features very useful instructions such as cmp.w which were missing in earlier ColdFire cores.
When you express it like this… 233 MHz is already faster than what I can emulate, and I’ve heard of CF up to 400…
Fore sure, ColdFire CPUs are fast enough for most applications. The FireBee features a 264 MHz ColdFire V4e.
The 400 MHz frequency is only available on ColdFire V5, which is exclusively available inside some high-end HP printers. Unfortunately the ColdFire V5 is not available for anyone else (and will probably never be).
-- Vincent Rivière