Re: Very newbe help/pointers required about building a distribution from scratch

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl@lkcl.net>]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 9:52 PM, Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org> wrote:
> *Precisely* what changes do you need for that "architecture" - is it
> really a different architecture from armel? (Answers to debian-embedded
> please.)

 hi neil,

 firstly thank you for the informative post, esp. the history about
actually _doing_ an architecture port and it taking over a year to
complete - even with your expertise and knowledge - that puts things
into perspective (that this _isn't_ like e.g. gentoo, openembedded or
linuxfromscratch)

 the OP, jonathon wilson (cc'd) wanted to recompile to take advantage
of ARM926EJ-S features and also OMAP3530 features (cortex A8); i want
to recompile to take advantage of S5PC100 (cortex A8) features.
[apparently there's quite a significant speed improvement to be had
because the cortex A8 architecture was actually done by a different
company as a from-ground-up reimplementation of ARM instruction set,
that ARM then bought up when the investor pulled out]

 based on what you've said, would you advise jonathon that it be
better to target the "worst offender" packages and where the most
bang-per-buck can be had, for example recompiling the linux kernel to
take advantage of processor-specific optimisations i can think of as
being the most obvious one.

 l.