[oe] [PATCH] package_deb.bbclass: armel architecture name for eabi systems.

[Leon Woestenberg]

Hello,

On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 4:12 PM, Phil Blundell <philb at gnu.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-02-18 at 14:50 -0700, Tom Rini wrote:
>> I'm a little puzzled. So little endian gnueabi ARM is armel, little
>> endian OABI ARM is arm.  What about big endian ARM cases?  Thanks!
>
> Debian has never had big-endian ARM as an officially supported
> architecture, so to that extent there's no precedent to follow in this
> area.
>
> The natural name for a big-endian gnueabi port would obviously be
> "armeb".  That does leave big-endian OABI somewhat out in the cold but,
> given that OABI has been obsolescent for the best part of a decade, this
> doesn't seem totally unreasonable.  If anybody did want to use dpkg with
> such a thing (and wanted to avoid colliding with armeb) then I guess
> they'd have to name it "armob" or something.
>

adding some history here:

<quoting Lennert Buytenhek>

> It's not so unusual anymore since intel introduced the IXP series
> of chips which come with mostly BE oriented reference designs.

The nslu2 itself comes with an ixp4xx CPU, but the armeb port is also
used on a number of ixp2000 boards. Having a big-endian arm distro to
run on the ixp2000 was an important reason for developing this port.

As to why I chose armeb instead of armbe, partially because of the
-EB/-EL thing, partially because the arch name also has the endianity
at the end (armv4b, armv4l, armv5teb, armv5tel), partially because when
I first started porting a distro to armeb, a number of tools (binutils?
I can't remember now.) did accept arm*b-*-* as target string but didn't
accept armbe-*-*.

The latter might have changed in the meanwhile, but the original
decision to use armeb instead of armbe was made over two years ago.

cheers,
Lennert
</quoting Lennert Buytenhek>


Please note that there have been lots of issues with armbe (in
configure scripts etc), so I would recommend using armeb.


Regards,
-- 
Leon