On 01/29/2011 05:40 PM, Raffaele Recalcati wrote:
I'm very curious about your job. I'm trying to understand it, but a distro compatibility for every arm cpu is a great thing, making possible, with some change in pre-bootloader, bootloader, kernel, to have the custom board derived from evm compatible to choosen distro as well.
That's right that this is very convenient for distribution developers. On the other hand, in a product with a recent ARM core, it would be a pity not to take advantage of what the latest Cortex cores can do, and miss opportunities to increase performance.
See the benchmarks on https://wiki.linaro.org/WorkingGroups/ToolChain/Benchmarks/InitialMemset, for example.
I guess this discussion has already happened countless times, and it's hard to have the last word anyway ;-)
Of course, we will make sure that our contributions to mainline projects don't break existing platforms. Anyway, you can still count on other community projects to continue to support all the other ARM cores. In particular, Debian is a great distro for armv5 cpus.
Anyway, I'll go on with Openembedded for armv5.
And if you switch to a Cortex A8 or A9 cpu one day, you should be able to rebuild your rootfs from the same sources, taking advantage of some of Linaro's contributions to mainline gcc...
Cheers,
Michael.