Hi,

[my first, friendly, post]

At Mandriva there is some interest of having an arm based distro.

Matthew Dawkins made an awesome job on providing a very complete qemu image with a Mandriva/Unity Linux distro http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/unity/other/unitybuild-arm... [above link is a qemu image, kernel and a script to start qemu]

Personally, I am doing some research on it for self teaching, and I made several qemu images for testing, based on buildroot.net and based on openembedded.org.

Also for the sake of self teaching, I made an arm port of my fork of gnu lightning at https://github.com/pcpa/lightning and I also wrote another jit (based on lightning) for my toy/hobby programming language at https://code.google.com/p/exl/source/browse/

That being said, we have an almost ready to go armv5 port, based on mostly unmodified upstream packages (gcc, binutils, etc). But we expect that armv7 based boards will be common enough to require another distro build. So far our idea should to be to work on what appears to be the Fedora goal, e.g.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM/Fedora15_HardFP_Bootstrap

but from my minimal arm architecture knowledge, what I am proposing "over here at Mandriva" is to make it using arm instruction set, and using armv5 abi (floats passed/returned on integer registers), but enabling vfp-16 (using floats only for temporaries), this way, armv5 packages would work unmodified in the armv7 based distro.

Well, this is kind of attempting to work on sequential steps, but of course, going to thumb-2 and full/proper aapcs (hard float register arguments, etc) is not out of question. But so far my knowledge of of the state of art of thumb2 toolchain is not that great, but I made a "contrib" mandriva package based on codesourcery toolchain http://svn.mandriva.com/viewvc/packages/cooker/cross-arm/current/

Thanks, Paulo