ARMv4 vs ARMv6

Andy Green andy at openmoko.com
Tue Oct 14 13:17:38 CEST 2008


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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
| On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 11:52 +0100, Andy Green wrote:
|> Hi -
|>
|> At some point we will be working with s3c6410, which is ARMv5 capable as
|> well as existing ARMv4 capable.
|>
|> How is the distro side planning to come at that... are we just going to
|> treat it as ARMv4 so we can share packages on all the platforms, or is
|> there enough advantage in ARMv5 that we will basically build packages
twice?
|>
|> What's the situation then for people who have an ARMv5 based distro on
|> their device for installing ARMv4 packages (which they can run) too?
|>
| I thought s3c6410 was armv6 with floating point?

You're quite right, it's ARMv6, but it leaves the same questions.

| In 99% of cases users wont see much benefit from armv5 vs armv4
| packages. Some special cases like mplayer where the new instructions are
| used show real benefits.
|
| By default OE will build both armv4 and armv5 packages if you have two
| different machines. I'm not sure what we shall do yet, needs some
| discussion internally I think.

For kernel side using current tools intitally is easier just because
they are there, but it won't make special trouble there if we run the
same compiler with different options for example.  So either way is OK
but I can see it is a bit of a fine decision in the larger distro sense.

The "multiarch" case is a bit like x86_64 and i386 and it'll make some
furrowed brows I would think.

- -Andy

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