maemo.org - Talk - View Single Post - Canonical and ARM officially porting Ubuntu to ARM

	Benson	2008-11-14 , 18:57
	Posts: 4,930 \| Thanked: 2,272 times \| Joined on Oct 2007	#24

Originally Posted by TA-t3

So, what all of those applications rely on in order to get good performance out of a particular CPU is just this single question: "Did somebody add support for ARM v7a optimizations to GCC already?". If yes, then you can choose to optimize for your architecture of choice by using a particular compiler flag. And potentially make the executable incompatible with older (e.g. ARM v6) architectures.

Well, there's the issue that a lot of applications (e.g. iceweasel) used to be broken on ARM, presumably due to alignment and/or type size issues (but IDK). Fixing that is legitimate app-level porting. Of course, now that Debian has them working for ARMv4 (I think?), tweak compile settings and everything's likely to work straight off on ARMv6. (Don't get me wrong, even just building everything optimized for a higher CPU, with no contributions to gcc, and putting it all in a repository so you can rootstrap up to a full, more-optimized, system is certainly good work, but it does seem a little over-hyped if that's all that's going on...)

__________________
World's first inductively-charged N900!

Quote & Reply |

The Following User Says Thank You to Benson For This Useful Post:
Stskeeps