ARM EABI test image

[Andrew Turner]

On Sat, 2 Mar 2013 16:16:22 -0700
Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:

> 
> On Mar 2, 2013, at 10:53 AM, Ian Lepore wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2013-03-02 at 18:21 +0100, Ronald Klop wrote:
> >> On Sat, 02 Mar 2013 05:25:56 +0100, Andrew Turner
> >> <andrew at fubar.geek.nz> wrote:
> >> 
> >>> Hello,
> >>> 
> >>> I have built an updated ARM EABI test image for Raspberry Pi [1].
> >>> 
> >>> The only known issue is c++ exception handling is broken when
> >>> using in a dynamically linked executable. Static executables
> >>> should work with c++ exceptions.
> >>> 
> >>> To test it you will have to extract it using unxz and dd it to an
> >>> sd card, for example, with a USB to SD adapter on /dev/da0:
> >>> $ unxz bsd-pi-eabi-r247609.img.xz
> >>> $ dd if=bsd-pi-eabi-r247609.img of=/dev/da0
> >>> 
> >>> If you don't have a Raspberry Pi but would like to try it on your
> >>> board you can add -DWITH_ARM_EABI to the make commands you use to
> >>> build and install world and the kernel.
> >> 
> >> Is this also interesing on the older SHEEVAPLUG?
> >> If yes, I can test it somewhere next week.
> >> 
> >> Ronald.
> > 
> > As I understand it, the plan is that eventually everything is EABI,
> > including the older armv4/5 stuff, so that needs testing too.
> > 
> > You know what I haven't stumbled across yet is a simple explanation
> > of why EABI is better then OABI.  I tried to search for some info
> > the other day, but there are so many noise hits on the search I
> > didn't find a simple synopsis of differences or advantages.
> 
> Alignment of structures is more like x86. This makes all the weird
> hacks we have in the tree to support the old ABI obsolete, and makes
> all the broken ones that we don't know about fixed.
> 
> I'm sure there's a bunch more, but that's the main reason I want it :)

This, along with better toolchain and floating point support along
with better arm/thumb interoperability. I'm starting to look into using
the hard-float version of the ABI on armv6 and I would like to support
thumb mode in the future.

There are a number of third-party projects that only support EABI,
including Qt and maybe node.js.

Andrew