Re: ARM boot disks?
"M.C. Vernon" <mcv21@cus.cam.ac.uk> writes:
> There is no disks-arm on the mirrors. Do any boot floppies exist,
> and if not how does one get a working debian arm system?
So far, the Debian ARM stuff only works on the Corel NetWinder. It
probably will work on any StrongARM system if you provide your own
kernel (except for Acorn RiscPC systems with a StrongARM board,
because those can't use the halfword instruction).
As the NetWinder doesn't have a floppy drive, nobody has put together
boot floppies for it. :-)
If you got to http://www.debian.org/ports/arm/ - you'll find a pointer
to a disk-image that I've prepared.
We are going to have to recompile the entire ARM distribution very
soon as we move to a versioned glibc.
This might be a good opportunity to attempt to provide a userspace
that will also run on the Acorn RiscPC machines (based on
ARM6/ARM7/StrongARM CPUs). I see some benefit in supporting those
because Acorn has decided to stop making them, and a lot of people
would probably appreciate having an upgrade path.
When we started, we didn't even consider older ARM chips because I
didn't understand the issues and we were just using Corel's stuff to
bootstrap ourselves. From what I understand, there isn't a big
performance hit to support those, except for certain applications that
would benefit from the newer instructions (halfword instructions, long
multiply) from the ARMv4 instruction set (found on the StrongARM and
ARM8). I'll have to see if I can get access to an old Acorn machine
from someone.
Cheers,
- Jim
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