Re: The new armhf in town...
On Jul 18, 2012, at 03:00, Mike Thompson wrote:
> A few months ago I asked some basic questions about the possibility of
> a port of Debian armhf to the Raspberry Pi on this email list. I
> received a number of thoughtful answers that helped set me on the path
> to creating Raspbian -- an unofficial port of Debian Wheezy armhf for
> the Raspberry Pi. With invaluable assistance from Debian Developer
> Peter Green, there is now a new armhf port in town. Even better, this
> port has just become the official recommended Linux distribution for
> the Raspberry Pi as indicated here:
> http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1605
>
> This unofficial port of Debian armhf will now be downloaded and used
> by a significant number of the 200,000 existing users of the Raspberry
> Pi and will hopefully reach a projected 1 million+ users of the
> Raspberry Pi by the end of the year. Hopefully this will help expose
> 100,000's of new Linux users to the Debian Project.
>
> Just to recap for those who aren't familiar with Raspbian, it's a
> complete rebuild of Debian Wheezy armhf for the armv6+vfp CPU on the
> Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately, for Raspberry Pi users, the regular
> Debian Wheezy armhf port only supports armv7+vfp3d16+thumb2 capable
> ARM CPUs. Therefore, to fully utilize the capabilities of the
> Raspberry Pi users, a complete rebuild of 18,000+ binary packages was
> needed. This rebuild took about six week to complete using a bank of
> Freescale iMX53 QSB build servers very similar to what was used in the
> original armhf port. Also, the armv6 code produced for Raspbian fully
> ABI compatible with Debian armhf which actually made the port much
> easier than it otherwise would be.
>
> I hope this news will be interesting to Debian-arm mailing list
> subscribers. Thank you for your guidance and suggestions a few months
> ago that helped make this new unofficial port of Debian armhf
> possible. I've been a very happy Debian user for about 10 years now
> and I hope this returns something to the community.
A warm "thank you!" for your work Mike. I look forward to testing this out. Now I just need to get a Raspberry Pi! :)
Cheers,
Jeremiah
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