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Re: Softfloat on ARM?



On Tuesday 13 February 2007 10:02, Philip Armstrong wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 12, 2007 at 02:04:37PM -0500, Joey Hess wrote:
> > Laz wrote:
> > > Is it possible to dist-upgrade from debian-arm to the EABI port or
> > > is it a complete reinstall? If so, is it a "by hand" install or is
> > > there an installer image for it?
> >
> > It's a complete reinstall, or a very tricky by-hand on the fly mass
> > upgrade of everything. Noone has figured out a good way to do the
> > latter procedure, but it's theoretically possible.
>
> Will the armel kernel run "oldarm" binaries? (I'm sure I read that it
> did somewhere) If so, then switching the nslu2 firmware to the new
> kernel, booting the original Debian install, then installing the armel
> port in a chroot before switching over to it ought to work. Or am I
> missing something?

I think there's a kernel config option for this (CONFIG_OABI?).

> > There is not yet even a distributed kernel package for eabi for the
> > slug, yet alone an installer, but watch this space.
>
> Ah, well that would be a blocker for ths plan then :)
>
> Perhaps some kind armel soul could generate an nslu2 flash image?

Someone mentioned on this list back in January that they would build an 
armel kernel package: did this ever happen? Can't see one in 
http://armel-debs.applieddata.net/debian but I do see lots and lots and 
lots of packages! :-)

If there was a kernel image which worked with both the old ABI and the 
EABI binaries, wouldn't it just be a case of installing the EABI kernel, 
and then blatting the rootfs from:

http://armel.applieddata.net/developers/linux/eabi/armel-root-fs.tar.bz2

over the current root (mine is on a USB disk so can be done relatively 
painlessly), swap the disk back to the NSLU2, and cross fingers whilst it 
boots?

Someone on the list also mentioned hacking together some perl to move 
everything from / into /oldroot and replacing it with stuff from the 
armel rootfs. Not sure I'd trust myself to do that on a running system!

Is it currently possible to cross-compile an aremel kernel on an x86 
system and use that?

Cheers,

Laz



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