[Gta04-owner] GTA04 Boot speed comparison

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 21, 2011 at 08:13:01PM +0200, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
> "hardfloat".  A different memory handling (as I understand it)
> possible in ARMv7 which supposedly gives a general boost of up to 30
> percent.

The boost is by no means that high for tasks not doing any floating
point arithmetics (like a normal system boot). It really kicks in though
for multimedia playback. When I did boot time benchmarks on nvidia
tegra, the difference between armel and armhf was very small.

> Unfortunately armhf cannot peacefully coexist with armel
> (little-endian "classic" arm) as can i386 code on amd64. it requires
> everything to be compiled as armhf.

With multiarch it is possible to have and use both on the same system.
The question is: why would one want to use armel binaries on a system
supporting armhf?

> Debian do not yet officially support armhf, but an unofficial port
> exist which is slowly getting there.  More info here:
> http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort

The port is already pretty far and doing a full installation of gnome or
e17 is no problem anymore. Current problems some java parts and libv8.
The current status can be seen here:
http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatTodo

I regularly build armhf debian rootfs for omap3 and nvidia tegra
devices. Once I have my EA board I can supply a armhf debian rootfs for
the gta04 as well.

cheers, josch