[LLVMdev] Arm port

[Chuck Robey]

Sandeep Patel wrote:
> The Nokia N800 is an OMAP 2420 which is an ARM11.
> 
> If you want an OMAP 3530 today, I think the cheapest route is the Beagleboard.

Yeah, I see that now, about the N800.  About the BeagleBoard, if you're going
after an equivalent # of peripherals (screen and keyboard are things I wanted)
then, really, I think that the Pandora is cheapest.  I will say, without
reservation, that the BeagleBoard is the goddamndest best single board computer
that I've EVER seen, and I've put together a pretty large set of them, for one
communications company or another.  It's just my opinion, but I think that
covering that OMAP3530 is really important, cause you're covering a pretty darn
big slice of homebrew enthusiasts, as opposed to people who'd let their
computers end up as doorstops.

Besides, I've already bought the Pandora, it's kinda late to change my mind.  It
hasn't arrived here yet, though, and I expect it to be another month or two
before it finally does.  It's being produced by a set of open software guys, who
are great at putting together a good list of peripherals, but they really don't
seem to understand deadlines all that well.  I guess it won't kill me to wait a
little.

What was actually important to me was getting a compiler to assist a FreeBSD
porting effort, and I just hope that llvm becomes available for the Cortex-A8
(or A9, as you said) soonest.  I'm reading the llvm docs now, and referring to
my old college compiler books.  Unfortunately, I concentrated in OSes when I was
in school.  I did get a piece of luck, and was able to pick up a copy of that
great compiler book, cheaply, even (that guy didn't ever want to be reminded
what compilers were!)

> 
> deep
> 
> On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 3:13 PM, Chuck Robey <chuckr at telenix.org> wrote:
>> Bob Wilson wrote:
>>> On May 20, 2009, at 1:38 PM, Chuck Robey wrote:
>>>> 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.
>>> Hi Chuck,
>>>
>>> I'm not very familiar with the Pandora, but as far as I know ARM is
>>> pretty good about backward compatibility.  You should be able to run
>>> ARM code compiled by LLVM on it.  LLVM currently only generates code
>>> for version 6 of the ARM architecture, so you wouldn't be taking full
>>> advantage of the Pandora's processor but it may not matter, depending
>>> on what you're trying to do with it.
>>>
>>> If you are able to try out LLVM for ARM, we would welcome your
>>> feedback and contributions!
>> Certainly, I'll test it out.  In fact, I think now, that I do have a Nokia N800,
>> and it runs the same TI OMAP3530 (I think, but I'm going to have to go
>> doublecheck that) so I might well be able to test immediately.
>>
>> Tell you what: beginning immediately, I'll start reading all of the documents I
>> can find at your site, so I'm not quite so dumb at it.  I haven't seen that the
>> code was up for download (or checkout?) but if it is, I'll fetch it and begin
>> looking things over.  If there is anything concrete that I could contribute,
>> I'll do that.  But, just doing all that reading is going to take me some time
>> (to really learn it all).  If you folks can offer me a compiler tool which I can
>> ultimately use for the porting of FreeBSD to the Pandora (or the N800?), then
>> I'm going to really owe you something, I think.
>>
>> That means, I'll likely disappear now that I can start reading things.  I
>> haven't gone away, I'm just trying to get to the point that I'm of use.
>>
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