Re: [MirageOS-devel] Fwd: Mirage ARM port

[Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 20 Apr 2014, at 00:52, Andy Ray <andy.ray@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> On Sat, Apr 19, 2014 at 6:09 PM, Anil Madhavapeddy <anil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On 19 Apr 2014, at 00:05, Andy Ray <andy.ray@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I've been looking at the (rather slick) cross compiler tools for
>>>> FreeBSD and (I think) I have compiled a RaspberryPi kernel and
>>>> userland which I will now start to test.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> So firstly I think I missed the "k" in discussions around kFreeBSD...I
>>> didn't realise OCaml native code wasn't supported on FreeBSD ARM and I
>>> suppose it is with a Debian userland.
>>> 
>> 
>> I should have mentioned that the prototype referred to an x86_64 FreeBSD
>> kernel module backend, with the assumption that the hop to ARM would be
>> relatively straightforward.  With x86_64, the major downside is the lack
>> of soft floating point support (since the kernel doesn't save FP registers
>> across kthread switches).  With ARM, we should be able to use soft-float
>> and avoid this whole issue.
> 
> I believe hardfloat support is being worked on for freebsd as well,
> but it sounds like softfloat is the better option here anyway.

Right, but hardfloat probably still won't work within the kernel due
to lack of fp context saving.

> I'm pretty close to having the 4.01.0+arvmv6-freebsd (or something)
> opam compiler ready to go.
> 
> I'll grab the latest trunk and try compiling it next week.  If all
> goes well then I can provide patch for that.  When I was digging
> around a few days back I think I saw incoming cross compiler support
> which might complicate things a bit to start with (then dramatically
> change our lives for the better!).

Hopefully this should just be some configure script and EABI selector
tweaks, fingers crossed
!
> 
> So I guess there are pros and cons with each approach.  Another one
> which I am quite seriously considering is updating the ocaml port in
> freebsd to 4.01.0 and including the patch for ARM support which could
> then be binary packaged for pkgng.  It would be cleanest long term
> solution I think.

Yeah, CCing Gabor Pali and Vsevolod Stakhov (both FreeBSD ports
committers) who might be able to help with the update process here.

> Is there somewhere central I could put pkgng binaries and board images
> for sharing?

Good question.  I suspect a Github 'releases' tab is probably easiest.
I can set up a binary Git repository on *.ocaml.org when I"m back
(or self-host it using Irminsule, if Thomas is feeling confident).

-anil

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