On 26 September 2011 07:01, Peter Czanik <pczanik@fang.fa.gau.hu> wrote:
I'm not a compiler expert either, but I was told by Debian developers and at different conferences that using compilers from Linaro (the non-profit Linux development company of ARM, http://www.linaro.org/ ) should give the best results.
The only issue with Linaro is they fork upstream tweak and then submit back upstream. This on its own is fine and is how even we use the obs. Problem is that you get a delay between their tweaks being done and their tweaks being accepted and merged upstream. openSUSE have an upstream policy which means we use whatever is upstream first. We could use Linaro's versions of gcc, kernel etc but that would mean that the ARM port isn't a true port of the distro. We (I think I'm safe in saying we for openSUSE here) would much rather just have one repository of source, in this case Factory. I suppose we could use Linaro's versions until the fixes have been accepted upstream and hit Factory. That's something we as a community and those doing the hard work will need to agree and decide on.
When I was at the spring Linaro meeting, there were two EFIKA's displayed next to each other. One was running the regular ARM port, the other ARMHF. Both was running PovRay and rendering the same scene. One was ready in 5 minutes the other over 20 minutes. Of course the difference is not this striking in all use cases, but still visible. The Debian ARMHF port was originally done on EFIKA MX, but runs on many other machines. Some Debian ARMHF links, which might have some useful information. http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatTodo https://wiki.linaro.org/Linaro-arm-hardfloat Bye, CzP
For speed in getting a release done using softfp will probably be easier, although switching to hardfp will require a rebuild and will most likely throw up additional issues. My view is, if we're going to do it and we're targeting ARMv7 which supports hardfp then that's where we should start and get the pain out of the way. I'll admit I'm not 100% clear on the pros & cons but that's where my understanding leads me. I suppose we need to understand if it is possible to have builds for both hardfp and softfp for ARMv7 building and what is involved in that. Maybe we should target softfp first get the bootstrap up and running and then once we can have a decent ARM platform on openSUSE look at doing a hardfp switch. I'm still learning on what's involved so any more experienced input would be appreciated. Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-arm+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-arm+help@opensuse.org