Creating armv7 MACHINE_ARCH

Ian Lepore ian at freebsd.org
Tue Jun 13 01:04:07 UTC 2017


On Mon, 2017-06-12 at 09:39 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> Clearly, we woke up one day and realized Ian was right? And he's only been
> saying it since pre R11 since that was the first release that supported it.
> There was no armv6 support in 10. Ask a snarky question, get a snarky
> answer...
> 
> What's changed is that the port has gone from being mainly used by people
> that had an rpi that supported a bunch of other platforms (including Ian's
> iMX6) to a port that's used primarily by armv7 machines (including the
> rpi2) that also happens to support the rpi (which is the only !armv7
> platform). When Ian started saying it, rpi was one of the better supported
> platforms as well. Now with all the Allwinner support, improved iMX6
> support, and the rpi2 being armv7, we are now in a situation where most
> users and most of the good support is on that platform. What's also changed
> is Andrew's work on having a GENERIC kernel. We'd have a GENERIC one for
> ARMv6 too: It's the RPI config :).
> 
> Plus, we aren't quite doing what Ian wanted. He wanted a full rename. The
> proposal on the able is to add an armv7 TARGET_ARCH in 12. Not to rename or
> remove armv6. Sadly, that will still be there since the RPI foundation
> keeps finding new ways to repackage the rpi into new boards that are just
> too cheap to ignore.
> 
> Warner
> 

For the record...

1. Of course there was armv6 support in freebsd 10.

2. I never proposed eliminating armv6/rpi support, I was always about
adding armv7 as its own arch.  

I did once propose renaming armv6hf to armv6 without bothering to do
the magic softfp compatibility thing you did, maybe that's what you're
remembering (basically using tier-2 status freedom to break ABI in the
middle of a released branch).

Of course I support the new proposol to create an armv7 arch. :)

-- Ian



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