[Vm-dev] Compiling squeak.cog.spur on Pi

[Phil (list)]

On Thu, 2016-06-23 at 23:52 -0400, Phil (list) wrote:
> The Linux world decided a while back that ARMv7 was the minimum for
> hard float but then the rpi became a thing with its ARMv6 which,
> unlike
> many/most other versions of the v6, included hard float.  So look at
> it
> more as the Linux world viewing ARMv6 as being unsupported like the
> Intel 486 or older (I think they even bumped that up to Pentium
> recently)... i.e. it's unsupported by default on modern distros, but
> of
> course you can still build a custom distro that supports it as they
> did
> for the Pi.  So this puts the original Pi in the odd position of
> being
> unsupported by any of the armhf distros where the Pi 2 and later can
> run most of them.  But running a non-Raspberry armhf distro likely
> also
> means that you have this issue of not being able to build ARMv6
> binaries.

Just thought of a possibly better way to explain this for anyone who
remembers the bad old days: remember how great it was when the Intel
486 came out and you could assume anyone running on a 486 had hardware
floating point?  Then the 486SX with disabled FP came out and screwed
that assumption up.  The Pi 1 was essentially the reverse of that: a
386 with a built-in 387 which became wildly popular... not what the
Linux world was expecting.