Re: Preliminary 'wip-armhf' branch pushed

[Mark H Weaver]

Hi John,

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:
> It would seem then, that the only difference between the wip-arm and
> the wip-armhf branches is the value of the --with-fpu flag.

That is not even close to the truth, as anyone who actually looks at the
branches (or tries to build them) can easily see.  John, I appreciate
your preliminary work on 'wip-arm', and I credited you in the final
patch on 'wip-armhf', but you didn't get very far.

> I'm not an ARM expert, so I don't know how important that setting is.

I assuming that the Debian armhf developers are far more knowledgeable
than either of us, so I followed their lead.  There is some discussion
here:

  https://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort
  https://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort/VfpComparison

> But I do know that there are many different fpus - if we are going to
> have a new branch for every combination of flags then there are going
> to be rather a lot of branches.

First of all, the branch is temporary.  Like mips64el before it, this
branch will be merged into 'core-updates' and 'master' when it's ready.

I don't think we need a 'system' for every combination of flags.  We
should just find a small number of "sweet spots" in the tradeoff between
minimum requirements vs performance.  IMO, for 32-bit ARM, two systems
should be enough: armhf, and maybe another one (armel?) that works on
lower-end processors.

Other opinions?

     Mark