Re: Debian ports for RiscPC, ARM710, etc.

[Matthew Wilcox <Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com>]

On Mon, Sep 28, 1998 at 04:22:24PM -0700, Jim Pick wrote:
> 
> Matthew Wilcox <Matthew.Wilcox@genedata.com> writes:
> 
> > Sorry, it's not nearly that simple.  Can we have a debian-arm and a
> > debian-acorn distribution, otherwise people will be confused.  People
> > would have been more confused had Phoebe ever made it into production.
> > (This would be an Acorn machine which supported the StrongARM properly)
> 
> We could call the "armv3" distribution an "arm-acorn" distribution.
> That might make sense, especially if we decide to use halfword
> instructions for the "arm" version, so it wouldn't run on any of the
> Acorn machines.

That's what I was thinking.  Is there more confusion saying `The armv3
distribution is for all ARM6 & ARM7 machines, plus the Acorn RiscPC
with StrongARM', or saying `The acorn distribution is for all Acorn
machines, plus anything less than a StrongARM'?  Thinking about it,
I guess I'm wrong.  The easiest thing to do is to cope with people
complaining that the `arm' distribution doesn't work on their RiscPC,
rather than cope with people saying `but my machine isn't an acorn'
Damn, I hate hardware ;-)

> Of course, that might not be a good name, because Acorn could release
> something in the future based on the StrongARM.  Also, there might be
> non-Acorn machines that need the armv3 stuff.

Hadn't you heard?  Acorn have dumped their Workstation division and
laid off 75 employees :-(  They announced their future lies in Set Top
Boxes and Digital TV, and I don't see much scope for running a Debian
distribution on those.  You may be right about other companies producing
ARMv3 designs - the Psion 5 _may_ be, but on the other hand it might
be based on an ARM7TDMI which is an ARMv4 architecture.  I honestly
can't remember.

-- 
Matthew Wilcox <willy@bofh.ai>
"I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms.  There are
better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of
one's contributions to computer science."  -- Donald E. Knuth, TAoCP vol 3