From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mark H Weaver Subject: Re: Preliminary 'wip-armhf' branch pushed Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:23:30 -0500 Message-ID: <878uhn7he5.fsf@netris.org> References: <87lhln7mlk.fsf@netris.org> <20141231174719.GA8456@intra> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Return-path: Received: from eggs.gnu.org ([2001:4830:134:3::10]:46100) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Y6OrI-0002oI-NH for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:23:06 -0500 Received: from Debian-exim by eggs.gnu.org with spam-scanned (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Y6OrF-0004Rh-Go for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:23:04 -0500 Received: from world.peace.net ([50.252.239.5]:57670) by eggs.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1Y6OrF-0004RP-Db for guix-devel@gnu.org; Wed, 31 Dec 2014 14:23:01 -0500 In-Reply-To: <20141231174719.GA8456@intra> (John Darrington's message of "Wed, 31 Dec 2014 18:47:19 +0100") List-Id: "Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution." List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sender: guix-devel-bounces+gcggd-guix-devel=m.gmane.org@gnu.org To: John Darrington Cc: guix-devel@gnu.org Hi John, John Darrington 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