Re: arm eabi port, patches

[Wookey <wookey@aleph1.co.uk>]

On 2007-01-10 17:11 +0100, Lennert Buytenhek wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> More and more VFP-supporting CPUs are coming out lately, and it would
> be nice to be able to use VFP on them in a sane way.  The existing
> Debian EABI efforts have been taking a while, so November 24 last year
> I started working on a from-scratch EABI port, sponsored by Applied
> Data Systems (http://www.applieddata.net/)  Six and a half weeks later,
> there's about 6000 debs built, and so far it all seems to work pretty
> well.

Well done that man. You have indeed overtaken us. (what are you
building on/with?)

> I can't share the debs yet (internal and customer use only for now),
> but I would like to get consensus on armel patches before I start
> submitting them.
> 
> The first candidate is dpkg.  Guillem Jover's patch available here:
> 
> 	http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2006/05/msg00032.html

I was having a go at this last week. 

Does that build for you natively? I got mysterious m4 errors last week
and haven't had a chance to work out why yet. I'd like to compare
notes. I also noticed that a lot of stuff changes again in dpkg
1.13.24 (which is current in etch) and it wasn't immediately
obvioushow to forward-port that patch (so I didn't, and wrestled
feebly with the above).

> changes DEB_HOST_GNU_{SYSTEM,TYPE} to have -gnueabi at the end.  I've
> found that this doesn't work too well.  For example, util-linux does
> stuff like this all over debian/rules:
> 
> 	ifeq ($(DEB_HOST_GNU_SYSTEM),linux-gnu)
> 	MOUNTBINFILES  = mount/mount mount/umount
> 	MOUNTSBINFILES = mount/swapon mount/losetup
> 	endif
> 
> And ruby1.8 does:
> 
> 	arch_dir  = $(subst linux-gnu,linux,$(target_os))
> 
> (which turns arch_dir into arm-linuxeabi instead of arm-linux-eabi.)
> 
> I asked Joey Hess, and he felt that there are probably more packages
> that depend on linux-gnu than on having gnueabi, which makes sense.
> The only packages that really need to know about gnueabi are binutils,
> gcc and glibc, the rest should just be checking defined(__ARM_EABI__).
> 
> Opinions?

I had wondered the same thing myself, but thought I should worry about
that after making it build.

I agree that linux-gnu seems more sensible, but then what is necessary
to get glibc and gcc to configure themselves right? (I haven't got
time to look up which things they check right now). The different arch
namespaces is most confusing at times.

Wookey (moving house in two days, and thus short of time to follow
this up properly)
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