On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Lennart Sorensen <
lsore...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:

> You can certainly run armel, armhf and armWhateverYouNameIt in chroots
> on an i.MX53 (I have helped with armel issues while running armhf using
> chroots and it works fine since the armhf kernel can run everything).
>

Useful to know the kernel is independent from the ABI.  I would have
thought that wouldn't be the case, but I guess it makes sense as user code
doesn't directly 'call' the kernel.  It's been 25+ years since I've had my
OS classes.

Both involve work.  If any packages in armhf specifically have assembly
> that requires thumb2 or something similar, then you could have some
> tricky stuff to fix.  The other option would be more focused on specific
> packages or libraries.  Certainly there is overhead in armel's calling
> convention even when using hardware floating point, but it would be much
> less work to officially get packages included in official debian armel
> I believe.  So the HWCaps + armel would be less work longterm I would
> think.
>
> Of course if the pi really takes off, maybe it could justify a new
> official port.
>

I guess the other consideration is what the product lifetime for the
current version of the RPi might be.  Easy to imagine a new version coming
out in 12 months with an upgraded Broadcom SoC that would meet the default
armhf specs. That would quickly obsolete any v6 efforts with regards to the
RPi.

Well that would also be true for people running i686 machines, and
> they aren't being catered to that way.  There are a lot more of those.
>

Hmm, good point.

Mike

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