Sandeep Patel wrote:> I am currently working on support for the Cortex-A9, but as all > compiler testing is more easily done on an Cortex-A8 today, A8 support > is implicit. > > What specific ISA changes are you most interested in? Are you able to > develop patches if we coordinate which areas to work on?Hmm. Well, my motivation is that I recently bought a Pandora (it has the Cortex-A8). It's not going to arrive here for a couple more months, I think. When it does finally arrive, I want to be able to immediately begin work on replacing the Linux that comes pre-installed with FreeBSD-arm. I'm not any kind of compiler specialist, and on top of that, the last 2-3 years have seen me medically retired, so I can't code at the same rate I used to. I'm perfectly willing to help you if there is some specific task you wanted to give me, but I only really wanted to see A8 compatibility. If I can help you with A9, I'm willing to do whatever reading is needed, if you think I might be of help, but my experience at doing compilers is very minimal. It seems to me that any time I spend helping out (assuming you decide there is anything I could do) would help me when I got to the FreeBSD porting task. OSes I *have* worked on, that part doesn't worry me, I wrote 3 of them. If you want my help, that's great, but if not, I'm still curious to get your feeling on how long it might be before something testable (not really release level) might be available for testing? At least to begin with, I could start coding on my own ultimate project without actually having the compiler, but it will start hurting me in not very long ... maybe I could start work with gcc-4.3.1 and move to llvm when it becomes a possibility, that might work out. Well, let me know if I might be of some help.
On May 20, 2009, at 1:38 PM, Chuck Robey wrote:> Hmm. Well, my motivation is that I recently bought a Pandora (it > has the > Cortex-A8). It's not going to arrive here for a couple more months, > I think. > When it does finally arrive, I want to be able to immediately begin > work on > replacing the Linux that comes pre-installed with FreeBSD-arm.Hi Chuck, I'm not very familiar with the Pandora, but as far as I know ARM is pretty good about backward compatibility. You should be able to run ARM code compiled by LLVM on it. LLVM currently only generates code for version 6 of the ARM architecture, so you wouldn't be taking full advantage of the Pandora's processor but it may not matter, depending on what you're trying to do with it. If you are able to try out LLVM for ARM, we would welcome your feedback and contributions! --Bob
Bob Wilson wrote:> On May 20, 2009, at 1:38 PM, Chuck Robey wrote: >> Hmm. Well, my motivation is that I recently bought a Pandora (it >> has the >> Cortex-A8). It's not going to arrive here for a couple more months, >> I think. >> When it does finally arrive, I want to be able to immediately begin >> work on >> replacing the Linux that comes pre-installed with FreeBSD-arm. > > Hi Chuck, > > I'm not very familiar with the Pandora, but as far as I know ARM is > pretty good about backward compatibility. You should be able to run > ARM code compiled by LLVM on it. LLVM currently only generates code > for version 6 of the ARM architecture, so you wouldn't be taking full > advantage of the Pandora's processor but it may not matter, depending > on what you're trying to do with it. > > If you are able to try out LLVM for ARM, we would welcome your > feedback and contributions!Certainly, I'll test it out. In fact, I think now, that I do have a Nokia N800, and it runs the same TI OMAP3530 (I think, but I'm going to have to go doublecheck that) so I might well be able to test immediately. Tell you what: beginning immediately, I'll start reading all of the documents I can find at your site, so I'm not quite so dumb at it. I haven't seen that the code was up for download (or checkout?) but if it is, I'll fetch it and begin looking things over. If there is anything concrete that I could contribute, I'll do that. But, just doing all that reading is going to take me some time (to really learn it all). If you folks can offer me a compiler tool which I can ultimately use for the porting of FreeBSD to the Pandora (or the N800?), then I'm going to really owe you something, I think. That means, I'll likely disappear now that I can start reading things. I haven't gone away, I'm just trying to get to the point that I'm of use.