Following [1] and [2], we took the decision to start a new Debian port, armhf, which will take advantage of the new capabilities of the new Cortex A8/A9 cpus -like the one used on the EfikaMX Smarttop/Smartbook.

The fact that we alrady have a hardfp karmic build, will make the process MUCH faster. I've already have ~100 packages built for the new armhf port, in only a few hours.

Stay tuned.

[1]: http://www.powerdeveloper.org/forums/vi ... php?t=1821
[2]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2010 ... 00019.html

Why not take the plunge if you're going to fork a new port and move over to require armv7 and enable thumb2 userspace? That'll take care of the need to re-fork again later on for that.

armel can live on as the legacy arm port.

The new port _will_ have the basic requirements: armv7-a, thumb2, vfpv3+d16. :)

What would rock even more is a 2.6.33 kernel - which can be compiled as Thumb2. Anyone care to backport those patches to 2.6.31 or forward port a Freescale BSP to a more modern kernel?

We're looking for enterprising individuals to beat Freescale at their own game :D

_________________
Matt Sealey

That can be done completely independently of the userspace ABI though.

Sure, but that doesn't mean it doesn't need doing as well.

_________________
Matt Sealey

All info posted to debian-arm list:

http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2010 ... 00008.html

For the impatient, here is the repo:

deb http://freevec.org/repository main

and a small tarball (no gui, no kernel/modules yet)
http://freevec.org/repository/images/ar ... n.tar.lzma
md5sum: 6c473e570daccd5f622c95419fe2aa62

More packages are being added all the time and soon we'll have the first debian-armhf autobuilder! Stay tuned!

Hi all,

Accompanied with Genesi's kind donation of 2x2TB disks to host debian-ports's archive, we now have an staging repository there for armhf (that is until it becomes an official and supported architecture and it moves to the actual Debian archive).

We also have a new armhf bootable 2GB SD card image here:

http://freevec.org/repository/images/ar ... ble.img.xz

After downloading the image and booting from it, you could add the new debian-ports repository at a higher priority by adding these lines to /etc/apt/sources.list _before_ the freevec repository:

deb http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/ unreleased main
deb http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/ unstable main

Eventually the freevec.org repository will be phased out, but for the time being it has to be also included at least until the packages have been moved to debian-ports.org.

Have fun and please let me know of any problems.

PS. There are some issues right now with vim, ie. it just crashes. I'll rebuild it with a new and patched compiler and I'll let you know.

heya marcos,

great news! how is current armhf coping with TO2 boards?

ps: please, get vim working soon! its absence is a show-stopper for me - my hands are tied up without it ; )

vim works now (7.3) uploaded to debian-ports.org (it might take a few hours to refresh the packages list, be patient :).