Re: Preliminary 'wip-armhf' branch pushed

[Ludovic Courtès]

Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:

> address@hidden (Ludovic Courtès) writes:
>
>> Mark H Weaver <address@hidden> skribis:
>>
>>> 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.
>>
>> It’s not even clear that “hf” needs to be part of the system name.
>
> I think it needs to be part of the system name, because on ARM these are
> two incompatible ABIs.  Among other things, the hard-float ABI passes
> floating point arguments in registers.
>
>> In theory, the bootstrap tarballs could be soft-float, which means they
>> would run everywhere, and from there users could choose what
>> --with-float and --with-fpu flags to use.
>
> A single GCC can generate code for both ABIs, but each ABI uses its own
> dynamic linker.  If we did as you suggest, we'd need two separate
> bootstrap glibc's, and improve the dynamic-linker-name patching code in
> our gcc package to rewrite the two dynamic linker names separately, etc.

Very good points, I had overlooked this.

Thanks,
Ludo’.