[LLVMdev] Arm port

Chuck Robey chuckr at telenix.org
Wed May 20 13:38:15 PDT 2009


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.



More information about the llvm-dev mailing list