* acrux (acrux_it@libero.it) wrote:
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On Tue, 3 May 2011 12:43:26 +0200 Victor Martinez <pitillo@crux-arm.nu> wrote:
_omissis__
i'm going to receive from Genesi some nice ARM based stuff (Cortex-A8) therefore i'd like to understand how enjoy them with CRUX.
Great, we wanted to ask Efika's community about its device and make a project presentation to see if they want to let us give support for theses devices based on mx51. Now, we have the server enviroment prepared (thanks to sepen, who moved the old "manual" wiki to pmwiki) which was the first thing to do before asking them and work with these devices.
that's right. They are smart people with really nice products. Several moths ago i pointed you on their development program 'cause we as cruxppc already received some stuff when they produced powerpc machines.
Now i'm going to receive a smarbook and some smartttops to port cruxarm on their own products. But i must advise to you that they ships from USA thus there are a lot of custom fees.. really a pain for us we live in EU. E.g. you must pay as taxes (fixed custom fee+20% shipment+20% declared value) about the same price of a new product with 2years warranty from their european store: http://www.genesi-europe.com/store/eu/
Yeah, you point us to ask them for a device, but really we want to have the server ready and a good wiki to let people contribute. These tasks are partially done now, sepen made a lot of work in the server, he setup lot of services and pmwiki. I already started with the new 2.7 version and we want to finish it after asking for a device. Now we have lot of work done, 2.7 is near to be ready. There is only one port at the moment which needs to be upgraded to make the first release candidate for 2.7 (perl).
About me... I'm a really long-long-standing CRUX user on x86 and later on I moved to PowerPC and Sparc64. I also did, from scratch, a 2.4 release full 64bit for my old Sun Ultra5. I also use x86-64 machines but only with MS products.
I have read about CRUX-PPC project too some time ago, but never made any kind of test (lack of hardware here).
i know... Power Architecture stuff is nice but still expensive.
True.
I'd like to port and support a CRUX ARM flavour for the only Genesi Efika MX (i.MX515) as I still interested to maintain alive the CRUX PPC project.
With CRUX PPC we used to have a kind of PPC overlay managed quite good from a bot on our own server and with a well tuned port/package manager like our ilenia[1]. There are a good numbers of ports that must unavoidably be different from the x86 ones. Anyway there are other deep differences as CRUX PPC supports both 32 and 64bit archs sharing the same ports tree and it has a bit different toolchain.
In CRUX-ARM the philosophy is the same, or at least it's near it: We have some collections, cross and native. - Cross-collections are to let users cross-build ports and make custom releases or a manual ports build. - We have other collections (named like in CRUX) to overlay the defaults. These collections are used if there are changes needed for native builds. These collections aren't updated often, because we haven't hardware to make good native builds/tests. This is the stronger reason to ask Efika about their hardware (good hardware to start making native builds, with one machine or with a little farm and distcc).
ok, i'll look for them as start point. Then i hope to have enough skill on this platform and spare free time (you must remember i still have to maintan cruxppc) to became an active developer.
Yes, feel free to ask whatever. We'll advertise about the new 2.7 version when we have perl cross-compiled. If you can contribute in any sense, all things will be welcome (opinions, manuals, suggestions, ...) and don't worry about time, we have lot of things between hands too but there are lot of ways to keep things together (irc, ML, wiki, ...)
I was thinking to start from CRUX PPC ports tree but 'cause there already is a your full working ARM port I hope we'll help each others to understand how I can implement my effort with your nice project and to help you to improve it if i'm capable.
It should be enought with the current 2.6 release. To develop the new version, which is on the way, we start first with cross-builds. With the core cross- compiled we have the base to start developing cross ports or make native builds.
We are using pkg-get to manage packages. Very easy and good enought to let users make their custom repos (or use the official ones).
ok, it really the best choice as CRUX/ARM was targeted to handled devices but now ARM is going to be netbooks and green desktops quite fast and with a good amout of ram.
Well, really releasing a core tarball is good to deploy a little base in handhelds or netbooks (you can see wm8505, it's a little netbook too but less powerfull than the efikaMX). Making native builds on the actual supported hardware is a pain (on jornadas it's near to be impossible, but it can be done too; on other devices like prophet/touch can be done, like with the wm8505, with lot of patience. This is the reason why we tried to cross-compile things, but in ohter side, a good way to learn a bit more)
I'd like to have a full working and well tuned CRUX for this ARM machines i.e. EABI with HardFloat and SIMD Neon enabled. I still must investigate on Linaro resources about the best toolchain to choose but maybe i'll be obliged to choose gcc-4.6 and eglibc. A native build farm, i guess, is also desirable to implement with distcc .
That shouldn't be hard. We are supporting ARMEL/EABI in our toolchain. To give hard-float support it's only needed a little change in the toolchain, may be this could be a good reason to start talking about how to handle it, if it's good enought to start a new branch for hard-float (and neon). I don't see the poing about checking linaro's toolchain or use eglibc, but may be this is beacuse I need more knowledge about hard-float or neon use.
ok, when i'll receive my arm stuff i could be more specific. A valide option could be to share with you some stuff... are you located in Spain? I must investigate about shipment cost.
Yes, we are in Spain. I don't know so much about shipment cost.
Btw, i started a thread on powerdevelopers forum to quick understand the actual state of the art with EfikaMX: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=14585
Great, I took a look and seems interesting. I don't know so much about hardfloat, but it can be good to make some tests to give a try to the core ports with those flags which give problems with some core packages (seems so reading comments). With the current 2.6 version (for the newer 2.7 too) it's easy to modify the flags, and make a custom build for those devices. May be it's needed to touch the toolchain too, and it shouldn't be hard to make some tests. I hope this can be understood and give you some light about CRUX-ARM. CRUX, it's really a versatile distribution and a strong base for this project.
cheers, - --nico - --
GNU/Linux on Power Architecture CRUX PPC - http://cruxppc.org/
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Regards, Victor. --- Learning bit by bit Victor Martinez | http://lokalix.dyndns.org