Re: Softfloat on ARM?

[David Fokkema <dfokkema@ileos.nl>]

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 12:26 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 12:20:19PM +0100, Aurelien Jarno wrote:
> 
> > >>> I also cross-compiled the kernel on a x86 laptop (1.5 GHz) and that took
> > >>> me about half an hour. First, I though that it wasn't working right (I
> > >> Note that you need to use an arm eabi toolchain. Building an eabi kernel
> > >> with an old abi toolchain work, and the kernel seems to works, but then
> > >> you will have some problems wrt to ioctls. For example Alsa do not work.
> > > 
> > > Hm, I used to compile my EABI kernels with an old-ABI toolchain for a
> > > while, and that I think works just fine.
> > > 
> > > The case where ALSA doesn't work is where you run an old-ABI userland
> > > on top of an EABI kernel (because the kernel does not translate ioctls.)
> > 
> > True, but I also experienced the reverse on my NSLU2. Ie an EABI kernel
> > compiled with an old-ABI toolchain and running EABI binaries. My USB
> > card was not working with ALSA.
> 
> That sounds like you might be running into gcc PR27363.  If you've built
> your old-ABI toolchain without a patch for PR27363, you _will_ run into
> issues of this kind.
> 
> 
> > It may be due to the way the structures are packed.
> 
> Shouldn't matter -- if you use a gcc 4.1 that defaults to old-ABI to
> compile your kernel but pass it command line options to set the ABI
> to aapcs-linux (i.e. EABI, like the linux kernel build does), it
> should work.

I'm completely at a loss here. Is there a nice HOWTO I can follow to
make sure my ubuntu system (in a debian etch chroot, for example) can
cross-compile a kernel and other packages for my (maybe to be) EABI
NSLU2? And are those packages byte for byte identical to the natively
compiled ones?

Thanks,

David