[Cerowrt-devel] Cross-compiling to armhf [was: beaglebone green wireless boards...]

[Jonathan Morton]

> On 24 Jun, 2016, at 01:57, Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at pps.univ-paris-diderot.fr> wrote:
> 
>> the long slow EABI changeover that was obsoleted almost overnight by the
>> armhf work the raspian folk did, and so on.
> 
> I am pretty positive that armhf predates raspbian.  Let's please give
> credit where credit is due.

Ironically, it was I who demonstrated to the Raspbian folks the benefits of an armhf build for the R-Pi 1, back in the early days of that platform.  It seems like an awfully long time ago now.  :-)

I did it by building Gentoo in armhf mode - *on* my R-Pi 1 - and distributing the ready-built rootfs.  To do this, I simply started from a softfp Gentoo build, and rebuilt it from the ground up using the Stage 1 bootstrap method.  All the tools and support simply worked from that point on.

At the time, ARMv7 distros were already typically built in armhf mode, but ARMv6 machines were usually expected to use softfp (or even softfloat) builds originally intended for ARMv5.  Since the R-Pi was obviously going to be a “platform standard” and would always include an FPU, the effort of producing a proper ARMv6-hf build was justified.

 - Jonathan Morton