[Letux-kernel] [OpenOCD-devel] [PATCH]: d86217d board: add Skytone Alpha 400

[Daniel Glöckner]

Hello Riccardo,

On Tue, Nov 03, 2020 at 08:52:07PM +0100, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
> I still have my Letux 400 and it works, even the battery hold some
> charge... possibly because I use it rarely, but still do test it
> every month or so. Before the CI20 it was absolutely the only
> MIPS-LE setup I had (who much I wish it would be BE).

you have a CI20? In http://openocd.zylin.com/4246 the question came
up if the workarounds necessary for the JZ4730 are necessary also for
later XBurst chips.

> The cpu of the Letux400 is a bit hampered by the lack of the FPU
> requiring a recompile - the original distribution from HongKong was
> optimized for that and run fast - including a mini-Firefox and MP3
> playback working, instead on Debian which requires hard-float and
> emulation is used, performances are bad, you cannot even an audio
> file.

Doesn't the Linux kernel emulate the fpu instructions?

> Remembers me the day of 68k Macs and Amigas which had no FPU
> ("embeded controller" or "low cost" CPUs...)

Before ARMv6 there were very few ARMs with fpu. The NXP LPC3250 is the
only ARMv5 I know which has one. When I bought my Letux 400 we still
had customers starting Linux projects on fpu-less ARMs.

Best regards,

  Daniel