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Date:      Sat, 09 Apr 2016 10:32:55 -0600
From:      Ian Lepore <ian@freebsd.org>
To:        Sylvain Garrigues <sylgar@gmail.com>
Cc:        Russell Haley <russ.haley@gmail.com>, Emb Aud <embaudarm@gmail.com>, freebsd-arm <freebsd-arm@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Can't installworld for arm -- cc: not found
Message-ID:  <1460219575.1091.334.camel@freebsd.org>
In-Reply-To: <0FE5C8DC-83CB-4206-AB3F-1CE28A612098@gmail.com>
References:  <CANC_bnNN6Dc-CoTe%2B=gGn5SRGn9KeJqFFBxub=5hviGLiUd7eA@mail.gmail.com> <CABx9NuSR7xG%2BGHncSvoNYM_S2ZXgnmRg195ZLdeXobVEh5CVbg@mail.gmail.com> <1460217833.1091.326.camel@freebsd.org> <0FE5C8DC-83CB-4206-AB3F-1CE28A612098@gmail.com>

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On Sat, 2016-04-09 at 18:13 +0200, Sylvain Garrigues wrote:
> Hi Ian,
> 
> One question about the following statement on the Wiki:
> The armv6 architecture is being deprecated in favor of armv6hf
> 
> Will the armv6 target actually gain native hardware floating point -
> and therefore armv6hf will disappear (like I had understand per a
> previous conversation on #bsdmips)
> or
> the armv6 target will indeed be deprecated and armv6hf will be used
> to build RPI images on FreeBSD¢s FTP server for instance?
> 
> Any sort of planning in mind for the « deprecation »?
> 
> Thank you very much and have a good day,
> Sylvain.

The words on that page reflect the plan as of about a year ago, but the
new plan (which I don't really understand the details of beyond "it
will all just work") is that armv6hf will cease to exist and armv6 will
be purely hardfloat ABI.  There will be some magical thing that makes
applications compiled with softfloat magically use the right libraries,
and this is supposed to make ports and packages magically work too.

Of course, this latter point is true only for some ports -- anything
that creates a library that other applications link with will
inherently be softfloat abi before the change and hardfloat after it,
and nothing is going to magically make them be something else after the
switch is flipped without recompiling them, so I think completely
reinstalling a system including all ports and packages after the change
will be required.  And of course that would require a package repo full
of hardfloat-compiled packages, and I don't think we have one of those
yet either.

My take on all of this is that arm is still a tier-2 platform for now,
and we could have made all this hard/soft float stuff right a year ago
when we first started talking about it by just flipping the switch and
asking people to recompile or DL the latest image.  I think in effect
that will still be the only upgrade path available.

-- Ian




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