Re: Archimedes/ARM3

[Philip Blundell <pb@nexus.co.uk>]

>       There are no plans to support older, really slow Acorn ARM-based 
>       machines (using the ARM2 and ARM3 processors), although it is
>       possible. ELF support for these processors does not currently
>       exist.
>
>How hard is it, then, to run Linux on an antique Archimedes with (I think) an
>ARM3 processor? Which instruction set does the ARM3 use? What does no "ELF
>support" mean? (Does it just mean there is no official value for e_machine?)

That text is a bit outdated -- ELF support *does* exist for ARM3 vintage 
machines these days.  (We use the same e_machine value for all ARM platforms; 
there is a bit in e_flags that says whether this is a 26-bit or 32-bit 
binary.)

There is a dearth of modern precompiled binaries for such systems, though
one of my longer-term projects is to compile up a reasonably complete Debian
set, and unless you have at least 8MB of RAM it will be slow enough as to be 
useless for anything other than giggle value.

p.