[Debian-coldfire-devel] Linux on coldfire

[Wouter Verhelst]

On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 08:05:48PM +1100, Adam Conrad wrote:
> Speaking of opcode shuffling and other fun stuff, I spoke with Jeff
> Bailey recently about ColdFire/m68k biarch, and after much discussion,
> we realised that if we want to get the most of this hardware, we should
> perhaps do the following:
> 
> 1) Get a kernel patch the will emulate missing m68k opcodes on ColdFire
> (so that our current archive works as-is on CF machines)
> 2) Fix up binutils and gcc to have a "neutral" target (as Wouter as has
> done) and compile all Debian packages from now on using that as our
> default target.
> 3) Get glibc capability stuff going on m68k, so we can take advantage of
> the ColdFire (and CF sub-model) crypto accel in stuff like libssl, with
> optimised libraries in /usr/lib/[whatever]

Yes, that's exactly how I think we should proceed, too. Except that I
was planning to skip the 1) in the above, since I don't know much about
kernel stuff and thought that it might require too much work.

If that's wrong, so much the better.

> > That means we're now ready to go modifying gcc. Which I don't feel as
> > confident about as binutils; anyone else feel up to the challenge?
> 
> I just got my board a few days ago

Wonderful. So that only leaves me :-/

> and am swamped with work, but I'd be happy to look into glibc hwcap
> changes and some of the GCC mangling when I find the spare time to
> power it up and play.  I suspect someone else (Stephen, Michael?) may
> be a better fit to look at kernel patches for opcode emulation.

-- 
Fun will now commence
  -- Seven Of Nine, "Ashes to Ashes", stardate 53679.4