Fwd: debian etch chroot, fix!

Brian Brunswick brian.brunswick+openmoko-devel at gmail.com
Fri Aug 3 22:42:29 CEST 2007


Having received the big black box on Monday, I've had time to do a
little playing, and the
first thing I came across was finding that standard debian-compiled
arm binaries didn't run.

I've investigated this, and its due to the FP emulator not being built
into the kernel. While the
openmoko stuff is compiled using software float, which gives better
performance, the
debian distro is still using the ARM floating point instructions,
which need emulating on
pretty much all ARM chips.

Looking at the linux package, in defconfig-2.6.21.6-fic-gta01 we see:
# CONFIG_FPE_NWFPE is not set
CONFIG_FPE_FASTFPE=y

But looking at the current kernel sources, as far as I can see there
is no FASTFPE code at all present in the kernel tree - its been
completely removed!

I recompiled the kernel with CONFIG_FPE_NWFPE=y, and it makes it 15K bigger,
but now all the debian binaries run quite happily, and I've
reformatted a micro-sd with ext2 and put a debian chroot onto it.

Might I suggest that this change would be well worth while putting
into the standard package, since its extremely useful to be able to
just grab debian binaries to experiment with libraries and toolkits.
If they end up being used in the final distro, we can of course
recompile them with the openmoko toolchain to use the soft float
and the standard C library.

-- 
Brian_Brunswick____brian at ithil.org____Wit____Disclaimer____!Shortsig_rules!




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